And now my animation has sound. I spent most of today listening to and editing the music aquired from my brother. Some of the music I couldn't use because it didn't suit the theme of my animation. However most of it I was able to, and I only had to make small changes like cropping sections or copying parts in order to make the music run for long enough. For the first piece of music I also lowered the tempo, so it played slower and well as making it longer.
For the emu's feet landing I cut and copied a loud guitair part from the end of the music piece and put it at the start to abruptly interupt the animation as the emu enters, and I reused that sound in a later scene when the emu is charging.
As well as adding sound, I also increased the length (and slowed down) the first two scenes, and lengthened the scene with the boy drawing - adding a few frames to the animation.
Next I worked on the girl crying out, one of the first images I added to my animation. I edited her face for more of a side view, and then did a few frames of animation - mostly just moving the hair and arm.
Today I finished replacing the last of the storyboard images in my animatic. The boy's side jump.
Following this I edited some of the extra bits, including the temple vein, sweat drop and sprays, mostly in the run cycles but also in scene 26. I used reference images to check on the colours and way the shadow and shine work in the sweat drop.
Then I edited the timing of scene 22 to make it slower, as it was too fast. I increased the time it took for the camera to move up the emu, and then made the cut images slightly longer and further apart. I also extended scene 2 a little, as I felt it was too short.
I finished the day by animating the boy's hand moving a little as he draws in the dust.
Today I edited my animation a bit to fix up a few bits I didn't yesterday, where a character disappeared or a scene ended before the next one began. I also replaced the storyboard images in another three scenes.
I did the boy on his hands and knees reaching for the stick, and then drawing. And the boy's face as he's eating the food. I didn't really animate much, still just trying to replace the storyboard images to get it done. But now I only have one more scene, the side view of the boy jumping. :)
Today I worked on the only scene left that was missing an emu. I did the front angled emu chibi run cycle and the front boy's walk cycle, in the same way as I did the side runs previously. I also tried animating the background because it didn't look right being static.
Then I started working on the front view of the boy jumping.
Today I animated a very simple (3 frame) climb cycle for the boy climbing up the tree - most of the work was in moving the cycle up the tree appropriately to the movement. And I also animated the full body emu standing under the tree in one of the following scenes. Lastly I drew the boy lying on the ground, with both the happy and sad face. Now that these things have been added, every scene after scene 26 no longer have any storyboard images present. I only have 6 more scenes to replace storyboard images in, before I go back to scenes to add extra details/movement.
Yesterday afternoon/last night I continued to work on my emu animation. I edited the emu snapping animation, added a transparent copy of the animation to the scene running slightly slower to give a kind of blur effect. I also edited the face so that it's eyes are closed while it's opening and closing it's mouth, for the two frames before the sad face I made the eyes look as though they're slightly opening, and edited the head of the one directly before, to soften the transition to the sad face.
I also added the boy in the tree, in the scene where the emu is standing under it.
Then I added the boy's foot to the previous scene, and animated it. Then I animated the emu going towards the foot to bite it and just missing. I tried to make the head going towards the foot in slow motion and speed up as the beak closes and he narrowly escapes. It moving slow didn't give off the right feel, so I tried adding some transparent copies behind it. But I'm not sure that I've achieved the look I'm going for.
Today I worked added to the petting emu scene. I added the bag with the emu chick in it around the emu's neck. Then I posed the boy to hide behind the tree.
Next I drew and animated the snapping emu head. I had to enlarge the picture of the emu head so I had to clean up the linework. Then I took all the different poses and animated it, and then smoothed it and gave it the sad face. I plan to roughen up the snacking, as it looks too neat. I'll use some ghosting to give the illusion of speed and wildness.
Today I added some more images to my animatic. I animated the girl climbing into the tree. I drew the girl sitting on the branch, and later refined it to make it less blurry and dark-lined. It stood out too much from the background, so I made the file bigger, fixed the lines and shrunk it back down to the required scale.
I also added her to the emu petting scene. I also added the emu later. Before that I worked on the emu standing under the tree, and the emu's legs stepping onto the screen while the boy is lying on the ground.
I have been working on adding the girl into as many of the remaining scenes as I can. Yesterday I added her to the scene where she is giving the boy a stick, and also the back of her head in the running towards tree scene. Today I added her back to the chibi run away scene, scene 26. I also drew a picture for her hanging onto the tree's branch.
Yesterday I started by working on the inbetween frames for the hand drawing animation. I found that I didn't need one between every frame only two of them. Then I used all the frames to trace the line more accurately.
Next I worked on the silhoette walk cycle, which wasn't too difficult. I only had to do half a cycle since its a silhoette and you can't see the difference between legs and an inbetween between each pose so it wasn't too fast or jumpy. Then I had to speed up the groud movement a bit so that it matched with the speed of the walk to look more like the emu was actually walking on it. I did add a little bit of secondary animation, but nothing fancy, just subtle. My biggest concern was not having it look weird with all of the movement happening on the same frames.
After that I worked on something simple. The back of the boy's head in scene 22, with the emu towering over him. This didn't take very long. Following that I did the close up on the boy's face crying, and I also added a flipped version of the chibi girl's side shocked look, towards one of the last scenes.
The next thing I did took the rest of the night and I finished working on this morning, and that was rearranging the front boy into the kindersitting pose and the side girl into the couching pose for scene 2. I finished the boy last night, and had to tweek the girl some more this morning. I found that she looked too old, and tried altering her profile to make her nose less prominent and her chin small, and the length of her body a bit smaller.
Then I resized, saved the pose and stuck it in my animation. Then I returned the image to its original big size and copied the girl into a new file for the close up.
Next I ended up editing the drawing, to make the lines stand out more against the rest of the background. Then I figured out a way to animated the drawing that was easy, fast and effective. I removed the river from one image using the clone tool, then with another removed the background from the river. Then I placed the river above the background without in Aftereffects and used a mask to cover it, and animated the mask to make the line appear with the stick.
Then I spent the rest of the day working on the close up of the boy's body as he takes food out of the bag. I did frame by frame movement of the arm reaching into the bag and coming out again. I ended up having to play around with the order of a lot of the frames to make it look more natural (including deleting some and making copies of others).
My silhoette walk cycle: The back of the boy's head: The boy's crying face: The kids siting: The girl close up: 2 frames of the boy taking food out of the bag animation:
Tonight I worked on scene 4. The hand drawing in the dust. I recorded my own hand drawing the movement from a similar angle, then screen grabbed the main poses and drew them in Photoshop used the stills as reference. I drew about 5 poses in Photoshop (there were six but I scrapped one) and then arranged and animated the transition and movement between them. I still plan to add some inbetween frames to soften the transition between poses, but I've got the base done :)
