Great to have everybody in and working away today. Lovely stuff from all of you! We're making good progress and I'll be typing up a quick recap of everything that was discussed both Monday and today a little later this evening. 'Til then, enjoy this delicious revised animatic scene:
I've basically just animated the crow's run cycle to help us visualise how she might actually run, as well as to help synchronise the scrolling of the background. I've made some attempts to fix up the scarecrow's crash — I corrected the scrolling ground so that it was a little slower to match the bushes. I was having problems with the spinning hang glider and getting the speed of the scarecrow right, so Jazzy suggested removing the spinning and simply having him approach the camera at high speed. I think it works a lot better this way and is much less distracting! She also pointed out that the scarecrow remained in-line with the crow even as the background slowed to a stop, so we now have him moving towards the camera much earlier.
Ron gave us some great advice and suggested preceding the camera shake with a flashing black/white frame effect. He showed us a very clever car crash scene in 101 Dalmatians where a similar technique is used — for a split second the cars flash orange/yellow — a very subtle effect that you don't really see but definitely 'feel.' After the flash occurs in our animatic, we cut straight to the camera shake. I think that the scene is working much better now as a result. The addition of the crow's cute little waddle is ridiculous but (hopefully) quite effective...!
Here's the scene Ron showed to us, if you watch closely you can see the effect:
I've managed to download it and am able to go through it frame-by-frame, which helps to see how it's constructed.
The effect is literally just three frames of flashing colour with a slight camera shake. You'll notice that there is no other indication of the crash — no crumpling bonnets, or anything. In fact it doesn't even appear that the two cars have really impacted at all, but the effect is so fast that it 'reads' very well as a crash. For our version of the effect the flashes each last for two frames, which might be just a little too long. I'm considering cutting them down to one frame each and perhaps even showing a silhouette of the crow in either black or white against a background of the opposite colour (similar to the second image above)? What do you guys think? Do you have any suggestions? :]
The only other thing I'd really like to do with this scene is to have the crow continue her run cycle as she turns to look at the scarecrow. You'll notice that she stops moving her legs/bobbing around when she turns her head — I'll need to separate her head onto a new layer in or simply create a new image with her legs reversed in order to do that, otherwise her head will change direction with the rest of her body. And that will be weird.
Sorry, rambling over. Hope that made sense! GOODNIGHT EVERYBODY.
Alex
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