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