Scene 11 V17 — V19

Just a quick update on the crow's running cycle! :]

I was messing around with the previous wings and I was really, really struggling to get them to work — even spreading them further outwards still looked really awkward and the movement just wasn't working. (I've got a couple of examples of the other things I tried; will update this post with them later when Vimeo finally finishes processing them)

I can't really pinpoint exactly what was awkward about it, I think it was just the angle of the wings (so mostly my fault, the way I'd drawn them). The whole thing just looked off balance and the movement, I think, was very mechanical. The angle of the wings sort of made sense if they were straight up in the air but spreading them further apart

I was talking to Sam and we were both in agreement that it was going to be very, very difficult to make it work — he then suggested that I try something similar to what I'd done with the crow's front flight cycle, just having them flap up and down (or forward and back) as if she was trying to fly away.

The beauty was that I didn't even have to draw yet another wing — I could just use the one from the front flight cycle. As Sam said, it was ready for me, so why not just use it?!

I decided not to colour the wing or anything at this point, I just pinned it to the crow's body, stuck some puppet pins in it and animated it on the fly just to see whether it would work.

Version 17



And, hopefully... it did! Sam and I both agree that this is already a zillion times better than what we had before — I'm still not sure whether it makes sense but it's definitely an improvement whilst still maintaining some level of continuity. The beauty is the ease at which this can be manipulated — if it looks like the crow's wings are slapping the scarecrow in the face we can just rotate them back a little without screwing up the animation.

Version 18



At this point I coloured and mirrored the wing just to give a better idea of whether or not it was working; I also altered the crow's head bounce at this stage so it was a little smoother. I'm concerned that it possibly looks a bit mechanical now though, so I might continue to mess with it a little and try to liven it up some.

I think that this gives us a better indication of whether or not this will work. I think, at this stage, it's looking like a viable alternative for this scene!

At this point we showed it to Ron who gave us some very helpful critique, saying that the wings were looking fine but suggesting that it looked a bit odd due to the exact mirroring of the feet. They're perfectly symmetrical, which of course nothing in reality is! He suggested that we delay one of the feet by a few frames just to break it up a bit. He also suggested altering the head bob so that it comes forward and backwards in addition to up and down.

Taking into account his suggestions, this is what I came up with...

Version 19




I think that offsetting the feet has made a huge difference and looks much better. It's still got a lot of work, though — the head bobbing, in particular, I will admit was a last-minute rush job that I slapped on there without too much thought so I'm going to look at tweaking that. I think it's a bit mechanical — it moves a little too much in synch with the body when it needs to be sort of held steady for a while before suddenly coming forward/down, so I'll look at messing with the timings of that today.

Now that the feet don't move quite in sync I think it might be an idea to maybe get a little rotation in the body going as well? Kind of similar to what we had in the animatic. I don't know, something about the running looks pretty off to me still but I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe it's just because the scene has nothing else going on — once we get the scarecrow in there it might start to come together a little more!

Oh, and I'm really sorry Sam — I know you're working on getting the scarecrow in there already but don't worry, we can just copy the new crow animation over so nobody has to re-do anything ;]