More amended animatic scenes

More lovely work today guys, fair bit of reference filmed. Jae wasn't able to join us today but gave us the go-ahead to film some reference videos and has also very kindly offered to film some reference herself, so she and Sam should both have plenty of material to work with when they meet on Friday.

Jazzy and I worked on some more of the animatic this morning — I'm now really beginning to realise how tricky some of these scenes are going to be...

A little more alteration to the timings on the first scene, based on the reference video from last night and our recent discovery of the keyframe velocity and curve/speed editors. It's still not quite right but hopefully it's looking a little better!

I'm not sure about the timing of the birds — I found that delaying the one lonely crow for too long resulted in too much happening on-screen. It was a little disjointed and, to me, didn't seem to flow properly. It seemed to be most 'readable' if the crow followed fairly closely behind the flock (at a slower speed, so as to lag behind) but then break off as they flew away. Of course if you guys would prefer a different timing please let me know and I can amend as appropriate :] I think I've gone a bit blind to things like timing at the moment... straining my brain too much.

Looking at it again, I think the lonely crow comes in perhaps just a little too soon, so I'll probably delay her by just a little more and see if that works any better.

This was the biggest pain in the arse, but finally it fell to our mighty power. We started simply by experimenting with a fun little camera effect — a sort of pan that would reveal the sprawling landscape below. In the final animation we may toy with a slightly different perspective of the farmyard/trees, by having it stretch to a single vanishing point in the distance to give the idea that the hill is very, very high. It took a little while to get the speed of the camera movement right — we started by rotating the camera on a 3D Y axis in addition to moving the actual background itself but this caused the effect to be too fast (and gave me slight motion sickness), so we removed the camera and stuck to simply slowly shifting the trees up and the hill down which accomplished the same effect at a much nicer speed.

The jump was a huge headache and it's all thanks to Jazzy for fixing it up — adding the little bounce before he leaps gives it more the impression that he's launching himself off the top of the hill. Looks much nicer now we think. :]

This was just a quick and simple little experiment from this evening — I simply removed the moving  background from this shot of the crow, mostly to keep it in check with the next scene (overhead shot of the crow as the shadow creeps over). I also thought that, generally, scrolling backgrounds are used if the character is walking/running on the spot to give the impression of movement. Seeing as the crow is actually moving across the screen, I wasn't sure if the moving background was necessary? I could very well be wrong though and if you disagree or prefer the other version then it's no problem at all, just figured I'd stick this up as an option! :]

Jazzy and I are going to add in the extra shot of the crow pecking the bug from the scarecrow's hat on Friday which should hopefully give us an idea as to whether we need to alter the ending scenes at all. In the meantime, I'm going to try to figure out how to get the ground texture to scroll into the distance on the hang glider scene.

Expect to see some rather amusing videos on the blog very soon ;]

Alex