Animation Scene 4 V1

Hey guys here's the first version of scene 4! Just awaiting new scarecrow puppet :)

Scarecrow Coloured Design NO. 4

Crow walk cycle V8

Version 8

Finally! It only took me all damn day.

Personally, I think it's looking much, much better. Still problems with the legs and feet — as I said in my earlier post, I need to watch the back foot as it sort of slides forward before it even lifts off the ground. I either need to re-adjust the position of the toes so it doesn't move until it's lifted, or flatten it entirely and have it lift straight off the ground without pushing up onto her toes first.

This wasn't quite as bad a job as I thought it would be. It was a bit tricky initially, but eventually I sort of figured it out. Adjusting the position of the body layer itself screwed up the keyframes on absolutely everything, so to get around that I just created a new composition containing the walk cycle (minus the head, which I would need to animate individually).

The composition "body_walk" contains all the layers and keyframes for the body itself. Placing it within a new composition allowed me to move the crow around freely without messing up the animation. The head layers are left separate so that I could animate it independent of the body.

To attach the head to the body, I created a new "null object" (named "head_pos_control") to act as a control for the head's overall position. The "neck" object is the overall parent of the head and all its features, so by making the null object a parent of the neck I was able to move the whole lot into postion over the body whilst retaining the ability to animate each component individually. 

I then made the null object a child of the body_walk composition. This ensured that as I moved the body across the screen, the head would follow.

To line the feet up, I placed keyframes all along the walk cycle composition corresponding to the keyframes of the animation (contact positions etc.) After Effects lacks an onion skin so I had to sort of invent my own:

By dropping the opacity of the composition, duplicating it and then dragging the new one back on the timeline so that the next keyframe was aligned with the previous keyframe, you get a sort of faux onion skin effect and I was able to line up the feet quite neatly!

It's a bit complicated to explain, so I actually attempted to record my screen whilst I was doing it. Mostly as an experiment (just got a new piece of software I was dying to try out!), but also to save me the time of having to go back and screen shot everything. I'm lazy.

Sorry about the huge watermark... still, it was fun (if a bit weird) to do! Hopefully you guys might find it somewhat helpful?

I'm tired now. BED.

Crow walk cycle V6 & V7

I RETURN. WITH MORE BIRDS. Are you bored of me yet?! :D

After looking at the reference video I posted at the end of the last entry, I made some adjustments to the cycle...

Version 6

I've not yet touched the legs, all I've done is mess with the head a little bit. I think it looks alright, and in terms of the motion I think it could work. Part of the reason I gave up with this one was because of a slight keyframe problem — I don't know why, but I could not get it to loop seamlessly. You'll notice towards the end that the head bobs upwards much faster than it did previously — despite the fact that the start and end points are exactly the same there's a discrepancy with the keyframes somewhere that I simply cannot fix.

Even if I could fix it, though, I'm still not sure on it. It's still not right, to me, and I think it's to do with the fact that she's walking on the spot.  With the way that birds move, unless the crow is moving across the screen I'ms going to have one hell of a time trying to get the bobbing of the head to work. I've also been having concerns that simply tweening the walk cycle across the screen would look weak — if I were to animate her moving across the screen by hand, lining up the feet each time, I think it would ensure a much nicer and more lifelike result. So I just decided to bite the bullet and do it.

Version 7

It's not quite finished at this stage and it's a little difficult to watch, but I think that you can already see that the result is much, much better.

It has flagged up some problems with the animation, though — like I suspected the feet aren't really working properly. As she steps forward the back leg starts to slide forward before it's even lifted off the ground. If I want to keep the foot roll in there, I'll need to manually move it back to ensure it doesn't move until it's lifted off the ground. Alternatively I could attempt flattening out the foot roll and just have it lift straight off the ground, which may serve to give the crow that ungainly, clumsy sort of look!

I'll be back with another massive post fairly soon.

Crow walk cycle V3 — V5

I thought it would be a good idea to refresh myself on birds before attempting the crow's walk cycle again; Jazzy shot some great footage so I spent a bit of time analysing it and trying to break down the body movements.

Looking closely at the movement of the body, you can see that birds really swing their hips when stepping. Curiously, there's not much up and down movement, it's mostly tilting from side to side — their heads actually remain almost completely level as the body moves forward, then they suddenly thrust forward to catch up as the bird lowers its leading leg.

Look at the above clip! Notice how the bird's head is almost completely stationary. 

I also found this much nicer example on Flickr that better illustrates the point:

Image courtesy of Flickr user aaardvaark

The tricky part is trying to incorporate this movement into a fairly limited 2D puppet. One of the first things I noticed is how birds tend to tilt their body forward to follow their hips — my first attempt was to simply try and replicate this movement by rotating the body of the crow. It was hilariously unsuccessful. 

Version 3

Please note I am hideously embarrassed by this.

It just ended up a confusing mess. To be fair it's more to do with the silly way that I keyframed it. There just wasn't enough room between keyframes to have the body point forwards, then back, then forwards again in time with the legs. It just looked like a weird dance. Given enough time and playing around I could probably have  but halfway through trying to fix it I just didn't feel that it was working and so gave up, rather than wasting more time on it.

I briefly considered simply sliding the wing up and down a little bit to try and give the impression of the crow's body tilting from side to side but it didn't really work too well.

For the next attempt I tried to emulate the way that a bird's body sort of shifts forward and backward rather than giving it a lot of up and down movement. I also gave the wing a very tiny amount of rotation to try and give the impression that the body was going more side-to-side than up and down.

Version 4

Disregard the disconnected head for a moment if you will — I was trying something out and unparented the neck from the body. If this motion had been more successful I would have connected it.

This version's looking better but I still was't totally satisfied with it. It certainly could have worked and would have been acceptable, but I just found that it just wasn't "birdlike" enough. It's a bit rhythmic and robotic looking. I also found that the sliding of the body back and forth was a bit distracting — she's walking on the spot, so it didn't really make sense to have it shift back and forth like that.

Version 5

Again, a disconnected head. Taking into account what Sam suggested about an up-and-down body movement I tried replacing the forward and backward motion with an up and down one. I think it looks a lot better — less distracting to look at and it flows quite nicely. I still wasn't entirely pleased, though — the head bob seems a little too exaggerated and I'm not too sure about the legs. Something seems a bit off to me; they animate fairly well, give or take a few glitches, but again, they just don't seem "birdish" enough to me.

I found another interesting reference video; somebody animated a rather lovely walk cycle with an interesting bird rig:

Check out the lovely movement on this one! You can really clearly see the side-to-side motion and how the bird crosses its legs in front of one another. The neck and leg movement are particularly interesting. Obviously it's not a crow, so her head wouldn't move in quite the same way, but the way they've pulled off the head bobbing with an on-the-spot walk cycle is very interesting. Up until now I'd only been pushing it back and forward — it didn't occur to me to try tucking it down and pushing it up as she moved!

It also helped me to identify what seemed to be bothering me about the legs. Notice how the bird doesn't push itself onto its toes at all — the leg is lifted straight off the ground in a wide arc. I think that's the issue with my own cycle — her foot moves in a very human manner. It looks alright and I think I could get away with it but I might like to try tweaking it so that it lifts without the foot rolling.

Crow walk cycle V2 [lower block]

Thought it might be about time to attempt the crow's walk cycle again — spent a couple of hours blocking out the legs and this is the result so far! It's far from complete; there's no body or head movement at all, no weight shifting, no timing adjustments - literally just the legs.



It's horribly robotic and I know that's distracting. Just figured I'd show you the progress so far. How is the leg movement looking so far? Can you see any glaringly obvious errors? Anything that needs changing? Thoughts? Advice? :]

The first thing I want to do once I'm satisfied is sort the timing out. then I can look at offsetting each limb slightly to give it some drag, make sure everything moves accurately. I have nothing more to say. I'm tired!!

Exploring with the Hang Glider

Taking photos of a small paper and cocktail stick model I made last night, I explored different perspectives and I'll tell you what, it really helped. I don't think I could have done that without a physical 3D model. I know I need to practice with perspective because it's something I'm not too good at and it's very important to know for animation. I only managed to get one finalised picture done and I'm sorry if I got the colour scheme on the scarecrow slightly wrong. I noticed I didn't have reference actually on my macbook so I had to eyeball it with images on my iPhone :]

(bad quality photo is bad)

Progress report: 22/03/2012

Good morning everyone, fairly productive week so far, just figured I'd update you on the progress of things. The good news is we're almost ready to begin animating! I've almost got all the crows we need to start ready; I still need to tweak a few, but fortunately seeing as the majority of the crow's scenes are the ones I'm animating I can easily continue to work on them over Easter. The big priority for us at the moment are the scarecrow puppets and finishing off the backgrounds.

Andy has said that he'd like for all groups to have completed 20 seconds of animation by the end of this week. This is quite a tricky one; we're working with puppets, so it's going to be difficult for us to get 20 seconds of character animation until they're complete! I think, though, that we should just make a start animating using whatever we've got. Even if the majority is just zooms and pans on the backgrounds - we could then just drop the characters on top and animate them when complete. It would be good to get those scenes out of the way early so we can focus 100% on the character animation, which is of course the most important part in all this.

Having said that, like I said I've got a lot of crows done - I can probably start animating the crow's walk cycle  (when she's looking for the scarecrow) this weekend. Jazzy and I met up yesterday to discuss the running cycle for the crow's "freak out and run away" scene, and I think I can probably have that completed in time for the weekend if Jazzy wanted to have a go at that.

Jae has also sent us all a copy of the puppet for the second scene (brilliant timing!) which you'll find in your UCA inboxes, so again, there's something Jazzy can make a start with!

As you may have seen yesterday Sam already animated one of his scenes - the aftermath of the crash. He did a brilliant job with it and it's so amazing to see it in full colour - all that's missing is the torn up hang glider from the background, which we can easily add by editing the PSD file when we've decided on the colour scheme. :]

I'm going to have the timetable for the individual scenes drawn up by Monday so we can all see what we're doing and how long we have. The other thing I've been doing is compiling a big project folder for the final animation to help keep us organised. It will have individual folders (clearly labelled) for each component of the animation (puppets, backgrounds, etc) and also contain the individual After Effects files for each scene from the animatic, so you'll be able to check your timings and see exactly how each shot was put together. Hopefully this will give you a headstart when it comes to animating your puppets. It will also enable us to keep everything in one place, so when we transfer files to each other we know that everything will work exactly as it should.

I'll also type up a little "help" file that shows you the exact composition and export settings we need to use as well as explain where everything is within the folder.

We've got very loose plans to begin sound recording this weekend. When we meet on Monday, bring in anything you've managed to animate so far and I'll drop it all on top of the animatic so we can see how everything's working!

Happy trails!

Alex

Animation Scene 12 V1

Hey everyone, here's the first version of the final animation - Scene 12! This is only version 1 as I'm awaiting the crash from Jazzy so will post the finished version once I have that :)

Hang Glider Comparison

Alrighty guys I have a series of images coming up that compares the two colours we liked the most and how they look against the backgrounds and with the scarecrow and the crow. Look at each one carefully and see which ones really work for you.

I'm working towards the purplish grey because it's not too much like everything else and at the same time, it's a colour that fits in well with the rest. But I really need other opinions here so let me know as soon as you can what you think. 

As well as looking at these, if you've changed your mind about the colour of the hang glider and think neither of these work then mention that too. Now's the time to say :]

Once we've decided on the colour I can get straight into finishing the pan up background after the scarecrow crashes. It's lacking ripped up bits of hang glider ;P

First Example of Hang Glider Frame

This is looking at the framework behind the hang glider's construction. Of course we don't have to show this much detail but I had to think about the underside of the hang glider because it will show the bars that the scarecrow is hanging onto. If it doesn't look believable then it will be so awkward to look at... egh, I think you know what I mean ;P

Also a thought's just occurred to me. Do you think I should give the hang glider's outline a darker colour to the flat colours like the characters? Should it be just black? Or give it no outline at all like the inanimate objects? We've been working along two rules:

• Animate : Outline
• Inanimate: No-outline

What do you say? ^^;

Crow puppets #3

I really need to come up with better post titles!

Been slogging away with the puppets today but I think I've managed to make some fair progress. I think that most of the roughs are done by this point — the only puppets left to make are the jumping/running one, the "scary crow" silhouettes and possibly one for grabbing the bug (if we aren't able to re-use one).

Then of course I've got to refine and amend them as necessary — make sure they're articulated properly, fix all the problems, etc.

So here's what I've got so far...

You'd better believe this was the hardest thing I've ever done. It took me four billion years and I think you'll agree that it's the Mona Lisa of the After Effects puppet world. Maybe even the Sistine Chapel.

... seriously though. ;] pretty simple, no articulation (didn't think it needed it). I also composited it onto Jazzy's backdrop, to check the outline thickness:

I'm not quite sure it's reading very well, as the crow and the backdrop are quite dark? I did create an extra layer with a thicker outline that we can use if need be... maybe if the crow was bigger?

I did notice, though, that this backdrop isn't wide enough to fit a 1024x576 canvas — it's only 801 pixels! :S Do you have a larger version, Jazzy...?

The next one is one I've admittedly been avoiding — sounds a bit stupid but I found it quite tricky! I'm still not 100% happy with it — but it's a start. 

Biggest problem is the face. It looks really off to me — I think the facial features are too big and are sitting a bit far up the head. I think I need to shrink them and move them down a bit?

I've not yet figured out how we're going to animate the head turning. I thought I might just make a couple of beaks and eyes then kind of slide them across the face?

And the last one I've been working on is one that, again, I was avoiding because it was awkward — the dreaded forward run cycle...!

Yeah... I think the hair is a bit too crazy... I need to fix that! :S But I finally managed to figure that beak out! Though I didn't reference it directly, I was thinking a lot about the faces in Chicken Run and how the cheeks on those characters moved — must have helped 'cause I think the face is looking a lot better now.

I'm really not sure how well the puppet's going to animate at all — definitely something I'm going to have to test. The poses above are quick mockups — obviously we can spend more time getting the weight and positioning right, it was really just to see if the feet fit onto the body. Sorry about the outstretched foot, I know it looks really awkward (one of the toes is too small!) — I'll definitely have a crack at fixing it soon.

That's me done! I am, however, going to leave you with some nightmare fuel.

SOULS

Sleep tight ;D

My Time Schedule (Rough)

Hey guys, I made a rough time schedule for myself so I can see what I need to start doing and when. Again this is only a rough, I will be changing it around all the time lol. By the way, this timetable starts as of next week for me but clearly may need to change that :P


Sound/Animating Management Plan

THIS PLAN IS ONLY A ROUGH IDEA!! WEEKENDS MAY NEED TO BE INCLUDED!!

This plan is to ensure that I keep to a timed and laid out schedule to ensure that all the sounds have been recorded/downloaded and are ready to be put into the animation. Here is a plan of action of how I shall do this:


Monday 26th March 

• No sound recording today, concentrate on animating!

Tuesday 27th March

• No sound recording today, concentrate on animating!

Wednesday 28th March

• Look at the animatic and try recording several different footsteps for both the crow and the scarecrow as well as recording some distinctive sounds of wind. Experiment on different services for footsteps.
• One you have taken several recordings, compare them to the animatic and test each one.
• After testing, choose 2/3 that you really like and share them with the guys for feedback.
• After they have given feedback, select the best sound/s and save them. Save the rest for references!

Thursday 29th – Friday 30th March

• No sound recording, concentrate on 3D Modelling.

Monday 2nd – Friday 13th April

• No sound recording, concentrate on animating and 3D Modelling!

Monday 16th April

• No sound recording, concentrate on animating.

Tuesday 17th April

• Look at the animatic and concentrate on the sound effects. Record as many sounds as you possibly                   can but ensure to create a list of sounds that you need first.
• If you get chance, try out each of the sounds with the animatic.

Wednesday 18th April

• Continue trying out the sound effects with the animatic and pick some of each that you like. Share these to the guys for feedback.
• Once receiving some kind of feedback, choose the ones that you like the most and save them. Save the rest for references!

Thursday 19th – Friday 20th April

• No sound recording, concentrate on 3D modelling.

Monday 23rd – Tuesday 24th April

• No sound recording, concentrate on animating.

Wednesday 25th April 

• Look at the animatic and decide on some backing music sounds.
• Try the several music tracks with the animatic and decide on some that you like and share with the guys for feedback.
• Once given feedback, choose the ones you like and save them. Save the rest for references!

Thursday 26th – Friday 27th April

• No sound recording, concentrate on 3D modelling.

Monday 30th April – Friday 4th May

• Start editing the finished animation and start including the sounds that I have found/recorded.

Monday 7th May – Friday 11th May

• Scratch up on portfolios and sketchbooks.
• Finalise essay.

Report 20/3/12

I haven't been posting anything for a while since my title sequence animation, but in the past week, the group and I have accomplished many things and also come across some minor errors and set backs.

Minor Errors/Set Backs:
The group have been pulled back from animating due to not deciding on the color schemes for both of the characters meaning puppets could not be developed and created for animating.


What We Have Done/Accomplished:
The group and I have been inducted into the sound recording room (G13) meaning we can now use the sound room and all of its equipment for further use. This helps me a lot as I am the Sound Director and so I can use these facilities to my advantage to start recording some of my own sounds for the animation rather than using copyright free sounds found on the internet making the animation more like our own work.
The group have also finally came to an agreement for both character color palettes and Alex and Jae have begun making the puppets as we are looking to animate as of next week!
The group have fairly divided the individual scene shots equally so we all have a fair part of animating to do. This is to be posted on the Group Blog in the next few days.
Jazzy has designed several color schemes and shapes for the Hang Glider and asked the rest of the group which one we should use.

Here's a small example of the Sound Recording Workshop with some added sound effects!

Progress report: 19/03/2012

Following on from Jazzy's post yesterday evening, I'm typing up another quick recap of everything we've covered over the past week or so. It's a big'un, so please hang tight!

Progress report 19/03/2012

• Attended sound workshops last week. Inducted into the sound studio and introduced to the roland recorders. After workshops we decided it would definitely be best to record as much of the sounds ourselves as possible. Anything we're unable to record ourselves, we can resort to stock effects.
• We pretty much have a finalised rough cut of our soundtrack at this stage! Sam, it's worth bearing in mind that as animation progresses we might find we need additional sound effects to accompany additional movement — for example, when the crow freaks out and runs away — as she jumps into the air her wings will flap so we might need something for that. Don't worry... it won't be much, I promise...!
• We met on Friday to discuss concerns over the scarecrow colour designs. Jae, over the weekend, put together a number of alternate colour schemes and we were able to reach a compromise yesterday. Hopefully everybody is happy now and we can begin puppet production! :]
• Jazzy finalising hang glider design and we discussed colour/shape options. She's going to do a couple of versions of the selected favourites and see how they work alongside the scarecrow and background in terms of colour.
• Alex working on crow puppets — should have first versions of all puppets complete by the end of the week, ready for testing and refinement.
• Scenes divided up for production. 

We've got just two weeks left before Easter, guys, and we need to start animating next week to give us time to identify any problems. This means that we need to have enough puppets for us to at least begin animating our designated scenes — any remaining puppets can be worked on whilst Jazzy, Sam and I get started animating :)

Homework

• Jae — begin producing scarecrow puppets. We need to have enough by Monday next week for us to at least begin animating our designated scenes — any remaining puppets can be worked on whilst Jazzy, Sam and I get started animating :) (Sorry, I know I repeat myself!)
• Alex — produce individual animation timetable detailing the length of each shot and who's working on it. Carry on with crow puppets — do some more tests, etc.
• Jazzy — carry on with the hang glider. Meet up with Alex to work together on the puppet for the crow's run cycle.
• Sam — start recording sound this week, ideally — it's best to start as early as possible so we've got more time to sort out problems and so you're not having to juggle it on top of animating! 

I think that's all for now. It's crunch time, everybody... let's make the most of these next 2 weeks...!

Crow flight cycle test V1

As promised, here's a peek at the flight cycle so far: 

Sorry, I should have looped it a little better. I'll upload a better version so you can see it loop a bit more easily.

It's fairly rough so far — lots of problems but I think the basics of the movement are there!

I think that perhaps the timing could stand to be a little faster? The downstroke of the wings, realistically, should be a bit slower than the upstroke. I also think there maybe needs to be a bit of a pause before she brings her wings back up? Similar to how they pause as they're at the top.

I had a LOT of trouble getting the back wing to look right. You'll see how it sort of flips/twirls as it comes back up — that was completely accidental as I tried to figure out how to fix the choppiness and I actually think it looks quite decent. The only trouble is that the front wing doesn't match — I could have fixed it but I thought I'd leave both of them flapping slightly differently and let you guys decide which wing looks better. I'd like to try animating the front wing in a similar way — with the little twist/twirl at the top. What do y'all think? :]

The body/head bobbing is a bit too much, I think. Maybe it should be a little more subtle?

Crow puppets #2

Hello chaps, just a few more updates on the puppets I've been working on!

First and foremost; the dreaded flight cycle... we can probably re-use the same body for the entire thing and all I've done is create new wings in various stages of flap (that sounds dodgy) that can be rotated to create the animation. It'll be a little choppy, but with some clever rotation and motion blur I think we can pull it off.

I screwed up the legs a bit — they're missing a joint! They'll also be much trickier to animate this way. Did some quick revision and sort of figured out that the legs should look more like this:

Still not quite perfect — need to mess with the proportions (think the thigh needs to be shorter, the "shin" longer and the foot longest of all?) She's going to need to extend her legs to land on the scarecrow so I need to think about how that's going to look which might help me figure out how the legs should go.

Above are the four wing poses I've created. The last one was a bit of a rush job so I really don't know if it's going to work — might need to re-do it slightly to make sure it flows as seamlessly as possible! The body, head, neck, legs and tail are all separate so we can hopefully animate the entire thing — including landing on the scarecrow's arm — with just this one puppet. Probably need to make some tweaks though.

For the scene where she either grabs the bug from the hat (might do a separate puppet for that one, from a slightly different angle) or where she's perched on his chest with the bug in her beak. I spent far too long getting the angle of that body right and looking nice... and then realised it would probably be cut off. Agggh. Sort of neglected the head a bit as well; looks very peculiar. Sam and Jazzy suggested adjusting the position of the eye slightly and I think I need to tweak the beak a bit.

The mostly completed puppets for the bug scene. The lump in the throat is a separate layer so we can move it around and shrink it or whatever as she swallows the bug. I'm still not wholly keen on the right-hand puppet — the head looks REALLY weird to me. I think she just looks too bald on one side of her face and maybe the eyes are the wrong shape? Personal preference, though, and if you guys are happy with it I won't touch it.

I know the beak looks really weird as well when it's open, but unfortunately it was the only way I could get this to work:

:D

The beaks can be fully opened or closed and should look quite nice when animated. I hope.

Pretty much all for now. I've done a quick flight cycle test — it's very rough, but getting there. Expect that in a moment or two.

Any suggestions, comments or fixes are more than welcome. Let me know whatcha think.

Alex

Breaking down the Animation

Okay so we've finally decided on who's doing what. Here is the image of my notes:

Keep in mind that the readings of difficulty might be a bit off due to miscalculation of the number of scenes ^^;

Scarecrow Coloured Design NO.3

Hang Glider Designs

These are the digital concepts I've done for the hang glider, the other traditional ones are in my sketchbook :)

It's been suggested that I keep the underside a simple colour since it'll only be visible during the running scene and we don't need any complex patterns to distract the audience then.

Shape of Hang Glider

I can re-design top left with Alex's suggestion of widening the wings' surface area.

Pattern Designs

Detailed, too detailed or simple. Personally I like the far left.

Colour Schemes

Next step: Looks at popular colour no. 2 and no. 6 and mix them with scarecrow colour scheme and backgrounds.

Scarecrow Walks

After I've finally got After Effects I managed to play around with a scarecrow walk to help me understand and explore the tools I could use with him. I know we've done After Effects before hey my last walking sequence was so stiff it looked like my character had a cactus lodged up her backside. So... I explored with creating a puppet and separating the limbs at appropriate joints.

Scarecrow Walk v1


This is a really rough draft. I wanted to see if I could make him lanky and weightless.

Rons' Feedback: The feet look too rigid, give it a pivot point at the ankle to prevent his walk looking too soft and gingerly. 


He's full of hay, since we didn't go with the stick in his body design ;) so we can really look at how flexible he is. Because of lack of limits like humans have, it is easier for him to move around.

Scarecrow Walk v2 (silly)


I thought using the Puppet Tool of After Effects might give a different impression of how he walks. Now I wasn't originally being serious with this walk, I was doing it just for fun, but I did like the beginning section of how he walked. I need another opinion so I dared to show it to Ron ^^;

Rons' Feedback: The main issue with it is the change in volume. Should we choose to use this form of moving the scarecrow we have to make sure we keep the volume the same. The squash and stretch doesn't work. However it does make him look more lightweight and free to move around. 


Like Woody in Toy Story his limbs can do things humans' can't. Ron suggested Breaking Joints. I remembered this from the Richard Williams series we watched on Digital Skills. In both arms and legs, breaking the joints might give a better illusion of more flexibility that working to the rules can't. This is because in theory a scarecrow can do that. The human eye wouldn't think it's wrong because we'll only see how flexible the limbs are.

I've decided to try the walking cycle again, working with both of the feedbacks, and see what I come up with :]

Scarecrow Coloured Design NO.2

Crow flight cycle reference and planning

Following on from Jazzy's bold attempts to stalk crows with a camera and capture them landing, I've been looking at how we might be able to animate the scene where the crow swoops in and lands on the scarecrow's arm as painlessly as possible.

By an astonishing coincidence I found this rather interesting video on Youtube:

I find the whole situation hilariously ironic - it's almost exactly the sort of movement we want and it's done in After Effects with an almost puppety looking bird. Of course, owing to the simplicity of the shape the animator was able to get a good deal more flexibility in his bird - note the flexing and arching of the back - it would be significantly more difficult to achieve with our puppet. I would imagine that he used a vector shape or mask of some sort within After Effects and was able to bend and flex the shapes at will. It's an interesting technique and certainly not one I would have considered. I could be totally wrong, of course - he may have done something totally different. I may actually ask him how he did it, mostly out of curiousity, but it may also be beneficial to us and give us some kind of insight as to how we can better approach this scene.

Regardless, it's a useful video to clearly examine the motion of the bird's landing.

From some quick doodles scribbled in Liz's lecture today (don't worry, I was paying attention!) I started looking at how the body would rotate as the crow comes into land, wondering if we might be able to simply use the same body and rotate it, or whether it would be necessary to draw new ones. Happily it seems we'll be able to re-use it. She'd lift her feet and spread her wings wide as she comes in, flapping to keep balance. We could probably use the same wings as well - they wouldn't necessarily change shape or perspective, simply rotate them along with the body.

I think we'd probably need about three "frames" for the wings - an 'up' pose, a 'down' pose and a 'mid' pose. As with the previous bird tests I did, we could probably rotate the wings down on the Z axis and then switch them to the 'mid' position once they get far enough. Hold that for a few frames, then they come down. They'd be blurred, too, I imagine - so that should cover up any choppy 'cuts' between each position!

If the wings are divided up into two or three sections, say, we could even try to get a bit of overlap by delaying the ends of the wings as she flaps up and down.

Puppet pose planning and reference

Starting to develop more puppets and thinking about how best to articulate each one. It's much trickier than you'd think; despite the crow's relatively simple design there are a lot of body parts to consider. I've been trying to think economically in terms of re-using as many pieces as possible whilst still maintaining lively and expressive poses and overall quality of animation.

I started with a fairly simple pose from a scene that doesn't require a great deal of movement in the crow — right at the end, when she's perched on the scarecrow, holding the bug in her beak. If done correctly, this pose could potentially be re-used for the scene where she actually lunges forward and grabs the bug from his hat as well. 

It looks totally awful at the moment — it's those blinking wings. I have a basic understanding of their overall structure and mechanics, but trying to rotate them and picture the folding from such a weird angle is incredibly difficult. The one at the top would probably work but I just really wasn't happy with it. The angle isn't quite right, really — the scene in question is more of an over-the-shoulder shot, whereas that one's a little more side-on. It could be used for the bug-grabbing scene, however! 

On the top left is the sketch from the 'above' puppet I posted previously. Nothing to say there.

It was pretty hopeless trying to completely imagine how the wings might fold so I compiled a bunch of beautiful reference images pilfered from Flickr! I opted to grab pictures of regular birds as well as crows — partially because there weren't many images of crows from the angle I wanted. The one on the far-right of the middle row is probably the most useful for my purposes, so it's the one I focused on most.

From the references I was able to scribble something that made a bit more sense — it took me a few tries and it's still far from perfect. I was using a poor-quality printout, however, and it was pretty difficult to see too much detail to reference. I started having real trouble with the head at this point — I tried hiding more of the beak behind the head to better suggest the angle but it just looked a bit peculiar. I think I finally sort-of got it though?

I'm not going to worry too much about the detail of the sketch at this point. It's really just to provide a base to work from — it will be much easier to correct all the horrible mistakes digitally.

I also started thinking a bit more about the wings and flight cycle at this point and how we might go about animating that with nothing but puppets as painlessly as possible.

As before, I started digitally sketching the base of the puppet in Photoshop. The reference on-screen was much clearer and easier to see so it was much easier to get the angle of the wings correct.

I also replaced the original head with one of the others that I had drawn, which fit the angle of the body much better. 

Once the sketch was complete I started going over it again with the pen tool, creating blocky shapes on each layer for each relevant body part. In retrospect it probably wasn't necessary as the crow isn't going to really move at all, but I figure it's always a good move to have articulated puppets ready just in case.

I had a bit of an issue with the outlines - the normal method of simply "stroking" each section wasn't really going to work in this instance - the way I'd divided up the limbs looked a bit weird when stroked like that. The shapes were a bit clunky and awkward. I would have had to alter a lot of the outlines by hand to make it work, so I opted to just draw them myself. It allowed me to keep a lot of the original detail - I think (hope?!) it looks a bit better this way:

Thinking a little further about the more complex sections of the animation, I started trying to figure out how we might look at doing the crow's run for the hang glider chase scene. In theory, it shouldn't be causing too much problem, as it's mostly actually already animated within the animatic. The difficulty, for me, is knowing how far to take it and how to make it fit within the puppet design. 

The animatic version is a simple two-frame cycle of the crow's legs simply going up and down. There's a bit of keyframing to move her up and down and side to side as she runs. Something like this could probably work reasonably well within the final animation, however I wasn't sure whether or not I should look to making the cycle a little more polished and actually animate the legs properly. One thing I'd considered doing was to have maybe three frames for the feet - one flat on the ground, the other being lifted up, and the other outstretched in front. I thought we could maybe take a simple leg shape and rotate it in 3D space along the Z axis to appear as if it was rotating upwards, lying flat towards the camera, to give the impression that she was lifting her leg. As the leg rotated the "lifted" foot could be used, switching to the "outstretched" foot when her leg is fully extended.

I'd really need to put an example together - it's a bit tricky to explain...!

I've started loosely sketching out a potential puppet, trying to figure out how to not make it look utterly ridiculous. Front angles are tricky at any rate, let alone for bloody birds... No matter what I do her face always looks stupid

I was referring heavily to the crow Jazzy drew for the animatic - it's pretty perfect, I've just got to try and adapt it into the style of the crow puppet.

I really don't know about the beak or anything about the face. I think the top of the beak... the bridge-y nostril bit possibly needs to be wider? The expression looks off. She doesn't look particularly scared. It just doesn't have the charm or humour or simplicity of the original, I just don't know how to make it work. I'm not sure if my leg idea will work either - still, best to try eh?

The last thing I started looking at were wings! Specifically, their application to the scene where the crow leaps into the air and runs from the hang glider. The animatic shows her leaping in shock, looking behind her before turning and bolting. This sounds like it would require a great deal of additional puppets, but I've been thinking about it a bit and I reckon it might be possible to get away with just one, using a couple of additional heads and wings for the jump. The body and legs could be recycled from the side-on run (which is going to be very similar to the walking puppet). We could probably just lift her legs and feet (as shown in the terrible doodles at the top there) and attach a new head and set of wings.

We could potentially animate her wings very similarly to how I did the flying crows - we could use one or two basic wing shapes and simply keyframe them up and down at high speed, then apply a heavy motion blur so all you get is a blurred shape flailing about. Maybe we could even kick her legs and shake her tail a bit!

The question of how to fold her wings back up for when she starts running is a bit trickier. We could probably get away with just adding a blurred mid-pose as she draws them back to her body - the whole movement will be very quick so I think we can get away with being pretty loose with it.

I'll have to do some tests to see whether it will work or not. Hopefully it will!