Do NOT question my tactics! I am ze Light Master! D8
Ahem... onto a more serious note ^^; I thought I could explore and experiment more with the lights with this scene better than the others. Plus I was desperate to see what it would look like. I kept the colours around orange and red which made the whole scene warm. That was done purposely because I didn't want the set to look cold, otherwise the dartboard would express too much bitterness towards the crow. The scarecrow would seem like a obsessed maniac then. I giggle at the idea but all of that lead to the word no.
I want to add more "Anti-Crow" objects in the background. Maybe have a VHS of "The Birds" in the bin or something X]
Hey guys! I've been slogging away over the past week, trying to pump out as many rough blocks of each of my scenes as I possibly can. I'm going to post 'em all individually rather than in one huge post, so they're easier to find later on.
Here's a rough draft of the chase scene so far...
Scene 11
I spent the better part of two days mucking around with those bushes and this is the absolute best I can do (in terms of composition). I'm really sorry, I know it's not exactly what we wanted, but either I'm not clever enough to figure out anything better or there are no other ways of doing it...! This something like my 6th attempt, and I know there are plenty of problems with it — I just thought it would be a good idea to take a break from it for a while...!
I think I need to extend the bushes into the distance a little more so they don't cut off so suddenly, and I should also make them a little smaller on the horizon too.
I tried to at least add a little depth by creating multiple rows of bushes so that they wouldn't appear so flat. At the moment they all move perfectly in time with each other which looks a bit silly, so I'll offset them a little so that the rows at the back move a bit slower or something.
The speed of the ground and the bushes isn't quite synchronised with the crow just yet; I still need to make a lot of speed adjustments, but at least they move relatively seamlessly.
I'm not sure about the crow's run cycle; it took me ages to try and get it looking right and I'm still not totally happy with it. I tried to "animate" it a little more so that it wasn't so choppy and lifeless! I'm not keen on the head — it's a bit static, so maybe I'll try and loosen that up a little more. I think once we get the scarecrow in there though it won't matter so much!
This background is not completely finished because it's missing the torn up hang glider. However that can easily be added once we figure out what the hang glider actually looks like.
Ground Texture
The ground texture can be recycled, alongside the sky shot, for the shots between the scarecrow and the crow near the end.
Conclusion Shot
This will be used once in the animation, before it fades into the final sequence. This is where we'll see the crow on the scarecrow's chest.
Close Up of Barn Door
As you can probably tell this is another use of recycling scenes. I just took the barn door and got the 'camera' closer. The only difference is I have made the two doors independent layers on the psd file so we can have them open and close. When they door move you can just see black behind them.
Insect Shot no. 1
In the animatic I originally did this shot as corn close ups. Because for the other shots I did green bushes, it didn't make sense that they were suddenly yellow. It would also cause a bit more hassle to go back and change all of the green bushes to yellow corn and we're trying to stick to a schedule (the backgrounds have to be finished by this week...)
So! I simply did a close up of a bushes' branch instead.
Insect Shot no. 2
Insect Shot no. 3 (Test 01)
I might redo this one because the morning sky colour looks odd. It might be better with clouds as well but I don't consider this finished yet. Hence why I called it a test.
A shot that can be used for the approach of the hang glider, and when we see the silhouette of the crow. Of course the clouds are a separate layer so they can be removed if need be. Just so it doesn't look that cheap.
Bush Side Shot
This will be used for the crow entering from the left looking for the scarecrow and when she runs away.
Bush Upper Shot
And of course we have the background when the shadow will loom over crow as she walks along.
This is, in fact, V5 — I just opted not to upload V4. Wasn't too much of a difference, mostly just a sort of in-betweeny stage as we tried to figure out the hang glider timings and whatnot. I'm certainly willing to upload it if anybody thinks it's valuable to do so but for the time being it didn't seem worth using my Vimeo upload allowance on it...!
The crow now runs whilst looking to the right. I just created two separate images of her two-frame run cycle and alternated them for five frames each with some keyframes to give the bobbing/waddling effect.
I also shortened the length of the black/white flashes to one frame each. It's not too much different — barely noticeable, so I don't really think it matters too much which version we opt to use. I did attempt to have an inverted silhouette of the crow against the flashes but it looked a bit peculiar and didn't really 'read' — the image kind of persisted in my vision and, to me, lessened the impact. I'll upload it later on so you can see what it looks like!
Aside from that, not much new. I'll slot this into the animatic and hopefully have a revised version for you all tomorrow.
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.
Following on from techniques explored over the past couple of weeks, I put together a test of the flock of crows from the opening shot. It should serve to give us an idea of whether the timing is working, the angle of the birds and the pattern of their flight. It also gives us an idea of how we might go about constructing the rest of the puppets for the animation and any potential issues we might encounter!
I was considering how best to approach the construction of the puppet — creating separate wing shapes as experimented with previously would look really nice if pulled off correctly but it might just be too complicated and fiddly to animate convincingly. I came across this video on Youtube of a bird somebody animated in After Effects, using one solid shape for each wing and rotated on a 3D axis to simulate the beating of the wings, very similar to what I did with my first bird test:
It's not terribly realistic, but it got me thinking and I decided to return to a similar technique. Instead of using one solid mass, however, I thought I might try breaking the wing into two separate components — much like we did in Digital Skills, with separate layers for each joint. This would give a degree of flexibility when animating the wings, allowing me to break and freely rotate the joint to give some delay and overlap to each section.
I drew out a simple wing shape in Photoshop and split it in half, each section on a separate layer, with the connecting sections rounded out to allow for neat rotation at each joint. Then imported it into After Effects as a layered composition and created a hierarchy of parent/child relationships — the wing tip a child of the wing base, the head a child of the body, etc. This meant that if the body or base of a wing was moved, the head or tip would follow, but I would still be able to rotate the tip and head independently.
Once everything was parented up correctly I moved the anchor point of each limb so that it would rotate from the joint rather than the centre. I then just keyframed a basic up and down motion of the base of each wing, giving me a very static but distinct 'flapping' motion.
You can already start to see problems with the puppet at this point. The base of the wing sticks out when the tip is rotated, and the base has a really sharp edge that sticks out of the body when the wing rotates downwards. All totally fixable, though!
To loosen things up a bit I then added a little delay/overlap to the tips of the wings, so that they would drag behind as the base of the wing travelled down, and continued forward when the rest of the wing was being pulled up. I also added a little rotation to the body and head, as well as a slight jerk to the body caused by the beginning of the flap, the force of the movement pushing the body upwards.
I also turned on the motion blur switch at this point, just to smooth things out a little.
I did also have a little poke around in After Effects' curve/graph editor, applying what I'd learned about function curves in Digital Skills 2, just to give a slight overshoot to the wings as they reach the top of the movement. It was far trickier than I thought. The curves don't behave entirely as you'd expect (sometimes, when you drag slope handles, absolutely nothing happens!)
I don't know if I'm just not used to it or if it's genuinely less intuitive. It has a separate graph for speed and value of keyframes which was massively confusing and just seems needlessly complicated. The top graph is the Value curve, and the bottom is the speed graph. If you look closely towards the last keyframe on the top graph, you can see that the curve extends very slightly above the keyframe. It's this that gives it the overshoot — the wing travels a little higher, then slowly comes back into the pose defined on the keyframe.
The speed graph is a little trickier to read but it's the same principle. I'm not entirely comfortable with how it works — I need to read into it a little more — but basically, the vertical axis represents an increase or decrease in speed (represented by high and low points on the curve, respectively) and the horizontal axis represents the 'influence,' controlled by bezier handles. The 'influence' basically controls how quickly the object reaches the speed indicated on the graph — much like Softimage, the wider the curve, the slower the acceleration.
To reach the graph editor (if you dare!) simply click on the parameter whose speed you want to alter and click on the weird graph-y icon thing next to the giant stopwatch/keyframe button. The graph editor will open up in the timeline panel, displaying either the speed or value graphs.
To change which graph you're looking at, just right click and choose 'Edit Speed' or 'Edit Value,' depending on which you want to alter.
Anywho! As a result of all that tinkering, this is what I eventually ended up with:
It looks just as bad as my first attempt did at this point, but experience has taught me that once it's actually composited and put together it (hopefully!) will look much better. Fingers crossed.
It looks too quick to me — I think that the wings should probably delay slightly at the lowest point before beginning the upstroke and vice versa. The body movement is off as well. It looks like it comes up too soon, before the wings have even started beating, so that needs to be shifted a bit — probably just as the wings come down, or after they hit the mid-point? The motion blur does seem to disguise the dodgy rotation sticky-out bits, though. To some extent.
Being just a test, I didn't go all-out trying to make it perfect and gorgeous, so I just dropped it straight into a new composition. I used the same techniques to put it all together as I did before, assembling multiple birds into one composition and adjusting their start positions so that they didn't all flap in perfect sync. Using the animatic timing as reference, I simply keyframed the scale and position parameters to fly them across the screen and towards the camera. I duplicated the flock layer a couple of times and slightly shifted the start/end points to create a larger flock.
One of the flocks originates from the wrong point and I think they need to spend longer on the horizon at the beginning of their approach. It's quite a distance they're covering so, realistically, they need to spend a bit more time as mere dots, gradually getting bigger and then increasing in speed as they draw nearer.
For the purposes of a test, though, I think it's alright. It's given me some ideas, highlighted some issues and should hopefully aid us in the composition of the rest of the shot!
As promised, here's one of the videos that I thought might be quite nice as reference. Take a good look at the backgrounds - visually stunning and the lineless style contrasts really nicely with the main characters. Perhaps we could look at creating something similar (but slightly more simplified)?
The fact that the story's about a scarecrow is an added bonus. :P
Remember — we'd like to see you all blogging away into the sunset!
