Animatic 16

Partly yesterday/the day before and mostly today I worked on my chibi run cycles, for the boy and girl. I only did 4 variations of leg positions for the run, and only 2 for the body. I discovered how to use the "match colour" function in Photoshop, which was very useful when editing the boy to turn it into the girl, so I could use it as the base, and change the colours rather than repaint them. There was still a fair amount of editing to do despite the cheat. I found it was easier to edit the second body frame (of the girl) from the first (already turned girl) rather than edit the two from the boy individually.

I had to think about how much detail to add to my chibi characters - as chibi/super deformed characters are usually very simple and don't have much in the way of shadow, shine or details. Working out how to show the boy's shorts was a bit challenging, because I wasn't sure how it would work without just looking like a skirt.
I used to same technique for these cycles as I did for the emu chick's cycle last time. I think I may have to slow down the movement of the legs in the scenes where they are actually moving across the screen, because their legs are moving too quickly to pick up on the movement, unlike the scenes where they are still and it is the background that is moving. For that scene I had found that I needed to reduce the space between frame changes because the animation looked too slow.

The next thing I'll be doing is slowing the cycle for the moving scenes, and then drawing and animating the baby emu into the cycle. Following that I will work on the adult emu and its cycle.


The boy's first chibi run cycle (chasing the baby emu):

The girl's first chibi run cycle (chasing the baby emu):

The boy's second chibi run cycle (being chased by emu):

The girl's second chibi run cycle (being chased by emu):


And my most recent animatic (with the chibi run cycles):