Animatic 21

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:



And the animatic:

Animatic 20

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 :)

Animatic 19

Yesterday I started working on the chibi close-ups of the characters' heads, starting with the boy when he is drawing.

Today I continued, edited that first image to make it more simple and then working on the shocked face and the determined face, and trying to animate the first face. I also did the girl's shock side-view face.

All of those pictures have been put into the animation and I have tried to animate them a little, to avoid having completely static images.

Boy concentrating version 1:


Boy concentrating more chibi:


Boy shocked:


Boy determined:


Girl shocked:

Animatic 18

Yesterday I spent the morning editing scene 22: the scene where the camera move up the emu as it towers over the boy. I made a replacement scene (22B) in which I inserted the scene 22 video interspersed with closeups of parts of the emu to make the scene more interesting and dramatic; it is also a technique that has been used in anime. I had to used three copies of the scene to place after each cut scene, in order to have the scene continue on from when it left off, rather than having it continue to play in the background with the extra parts playing over the top of it. The first cut is a close up of the beak, reused from the following scene, and the second is a close up of the eye, also taken from the following scene.

I found that the changes to the scene made the transition from this scene to the next (the close up of the emu's head with flames in the background) not as sharp. Now the change doesn't seem so dramatic that is would seem out of place; which is what I was starting to feel before, especially after I added a pulsing temple vein to the emu's head. It fits better now.

Some other things I did yesterday was to edit the movement and timing of the two scenes where the chase goes over Uluru. I made the movement better match the shape of the terrain they were running on and slowed it down a bit. I also added some variation in the relation of the emu to the children running. So it's not too close together, especially if the children are supposed to lose the emu in the following scene, although not quite the same on the way back.

I also made the happy emu head for scene 43, and some twinkling shines around the eyes. The glimmering of the emu's eyes look a little off, I'm not sure whether it's too subtle or if the shines are moving in the wrong way, but it should be hard to figure out.

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:

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):

Chibi run cycle

Yesterday I decided to research the chibi run cycle, to use for reference for my own characters' chibi run cycles. I found one at the start of episode 6 of Steel Angel Kurumi.
I took screen shots of the 6 frames of the chibi run cycle. Each frame of the cycle held for 2 frames and then usually had a ghost to transfer to the next frame, at least for the slightly larger movements if not between every frame. Here are the reference images: