Animatic 17

I got a lot done yesterday. I added the adult emu into a few scenes, as well as the girl in one. On Tuesday I spent some times adding the baby emu to the boy's run cycle, which I also finished yesterday morning. I am a little concerned that the baby emu is too small to see and possibly too detailed for a chibi.

I started with the scene that goes up the emu as it stands over the boy, since all that was required was moving apart the legs and moving around the head and some other details to make it look strong and angry and towering. I also made the emu a tiny bit darker for this scene to make it look more ominous.

Then I did the close up of the face in front of the flames in the next scene. I redrew the eyes to try to capture the rough, fierce look I'd captured in my storyboard sketch. I also darkened this image and increased the brightness in the flame background as they were a bit dull. I still need to add the temple vein to this scene.

The next thing I did was the close up of the girl's concerned face later in the animation, which wasn't very difficult, took the front view, changed the expression, moved the arm and then had to edit the body to raise the shoulder.

After the girl I went back to working on the emu. I did the charge sequence, where the emu runs at the camera. I did this using only 4 different frames. I tried to add two others to add some variation - one where it leans back before jumping forward and the another at the end switching between that and the last frame as it runs towards the camera, but I found that it looked better without those additions. I also animated the background a bit because it looked dull with a static background.

Finally I worked on what I was originally planning to work on next which is the emu's chibi run cycle. I started with one frame which I put straight into the animation as a placeholder so I could replace all of the storyboard emus straight away. As I did the replacements I also lengthened some of the chase scenes, making the characters run across the screen a bit slower so that the animation cycle would read better. Then I went back into Photoshop and drew the rest of the frames for the run cycle and then put them together in Aftereffects in the same way that I did with the other character's run cycles. So apart from the temple vein for the emu and the shock lines for the kids and baby emu the main part of the chase animation is done.

The boy's new chibi run cycle:


The looming emu:


The angry emu head:


The girl's sad face:


The four frames of the charge:


The emu chibi run cycle:


And at last my most recent animatic: