Animatic 14

Yesterday, after sorting through most of my notes, I got back into working on my animation a bit. I finished the scene that I was working on last time (Scene 11), where the emu enters, pushes open the bag and pecks at the food. I fixed up the necks of the pushing the bag open animation. Then I animated the emu pecking the bag, using one of the techniques that is used in anime, which uses still extreme poses and blending those with inbetween ghost frames. For this particular animation, I used only two extremes, one with the head down and one with it up, and only one frame inbetween, which I set at 50% opacity and overlaps with the other two extremes for switching between them. The final touch to finish the scene was simply adding an extra frame inbetween the emu finishing walking and opening the bag, just to smooth the transition between the two extreme poses of up and down, I didn't blend in this case because it worked better as a solid frame.
The only other thing I might add to this frame if I have time at the end is a few crumbs flying out of the food as the emu is pecking it, just to add that extra something.

The next thing I did was start working on the emu hanging on the bag (scene 40). I used a still from scene 11 to get the proportions for the bag right...which is when I realised that the bag in scene 11 was too small and I had to go back and make it bigger, which I managed to do without ruining the position of the rim of the bag, which the emu pushes, so I didn't have to edit any actual animation, only those few frames of the bag to stretch out the length of the bag and to extend the length of the strap. I managed to finish the image of the emu in the bag. I wrapped the strap slightly around it's neck (using a duplicate strap folder and a mask) so that it would sit on the strap better, considering the size and length of the emu's neck it would look odd for it to just be sitting on the strap as it was in the storyboard.
This exercise had been a caution for me not to reply too much on the storyboard images as reference, since the images in them (proportions) aren't necessarily correct or consistent throughout the animation. Especially since originally the emu chick didn't have a long neck.

After scene 40, I did the next simple emu chick scene, 42, where the emu is inside the bag. This was simple, I used the bag from scene 11, rotated it redrew the strap and cleaned up the other outlines, stuck the emu chick inbetween the front and back and it was pretty much done. Then I just had to stick in into my animatic and animate it a little. I also saved an alternate frame where the emu chick's eyes are closed, so it could blink. I did a similar thing with scene 40, I had two frames to alternate between: in the second the emu chick's beak is open wider and the shines in it's eyes are slightly bigger (to create the shimmering eyes effect that is so common in anime to show emotion).

So at the end of the day I managed to finish 3 scenes. :)

This is the frame I added between the walk and bag open:


This is the walk cycle:


This is the emu opening the bag:


These are the two frames of the emu caught on the bag:


These are the two frames of the emu in the bag blinking:



Animatic:


On a side note, when I was reading the other day Dreamland Japan (by Frederik L. Schodt), I found it interesting to learn that in Japan they have the same issue with words as we do, that the word manga means similar to comic, in that it implies humor or something not to be taken seriously, and the media (magazine titles mostly) actually use English or other foreign words to sound more sophisticated.