Scene 01 crow flying V8

Started making a start on the crow's flight cycle — although I know Jae hasn't completed the run cycle yet I thought it might be a good idea to start it in advance, just because it's a really tricky scene and it will allow more time for tweaking and refinement :]

I'll admit that I've been dreading it for quite some time (I'm sorry!) just because I imagined that it would be horrendously difficult and that I'd make a right pig's ear of it. I was pleasantly surprised, however — by no means easy but it wasn't quite as soul-destroying as I'd thought it would be. I did do a bit of a shoddy job though...



There are some glitches and timing issues with it of course — I really wish I could get the wings to hit the top of the upstroke a little more smoothly, but it's quite tricky with getting it to loop.

I don't think too many of the major issues will be terribly noticeable, bearing in mind that it won't actually be stationary on screen, it will be moving an awful lot at quite a high speed (with some cleverly placed motion blurring :P). I'd like to see it in action before I start making too many tweaks and refinements — learned that the hard way after the previous flight cycle...!

I'm thinking it might be quite nice to have the crow start lying 'flat' at the beginning of the cycle, then maybe rotate/swing her body forward as she flies into the camera? I might have to make a new puppet for that or we might be able to get away with simply rotating this one on a 3D axis... it might look really bad, though, so I'll have to do some playing around.

Oh, don't worry Jazzy, I'll look at adding the face once I've figured out all the movements and such ;]

Scene 19 [flight cycle] V10

Version 10



More mucking around. I'm mostly happy with the wings — tried to have them fold back at the beginning of the upstroke, as seen here:

Hopefully it looks okay!

Slapped some quick body movement on there too — not quite right yet, I think the up and down might be a bit too exaggerated (especially in comparison to the head) and the leg just sort of flops about uselessly, but it serves to give an idea of how it will look in motion!

The legs aren't strictly anatomically correct but it was the closest I was able to get to something that looks acceptable but is also animatable. If we just drop the thigh and rotate the shin, she'll be able to perch quite happily on the scarecrow's arm! :]

Scene 19 [flight cycle] V1 — V5

Scene 19 [flight cycle]

Version 1

The first flight cycle test, with all its individual components, still quite "stiff" looking despite all attempts to loosen it up. Unfortunately all the individual wing layers caused the animation to look REALLY choppy (even with copious amounts of blurring) so for this version I decided just to use the one wing layer and rotate it on the 3D axis to get the flap. The first attempt was pretty unsuccessful — it's got this weird rotation going on that looks as if she's pushing backwards! 

Version 2

The second version I re-did the flapping a bit, so that it travels more in a straight line with none of the weird outward rotation. It looks distinctly more like a flap now, but the timing's all screwy and the motion is quite choppy — the wing comes to a very sudden stop at the top and bottom of the movement, and overall it just looks really stiff.

Initially I thought I would just be able to alter the speed and timings of each keyframe using After Effects' curve/graph editor and use that to get a bit of overshoot going on (have the wings travel "too far" before settling back into the intended position) but I encountered a pretty huge problem:

The rotation of the wings is handled by the "orientation" parameter rather than individual X, Y and Z rotation keyframes. I did try using individual values but it just doesn't handle the interpolation as well as the orientation does. The problem is that, because the X, Y and Z values are handled by one parameter, they're also locked together on the speed and value graphs:

Basically, what this means is that I couldn't alter the curves of each rotation value individually. Altering the X rotation keyframe, for example, would also change the Y and Z keyframes, leading to all sorts of problems with things getting rotated out of place. You also can't change the slope of the curves, either — notice how there are no bezier handles on any of the graphs shown above. This is a massive issue — I was able to alter the timings to a limited extent using the speed graph but would not have been able to add any of the overshoot that I wanted.

At this point I started toying with the idea of trying to get the flexibility I wanted another way...

Version 3


I'd previously considered using the puppet pin tool alone to animate the wing, which would have given us some great flexibility and bendiness, but it's terribly imprecise and difficult to control animation as much as I would like. 


The wing is its own pre-composition, meaning it's effectively one flat layer with keyframes applied to the orientation values to give the basic flap motion. I decided to see if I could somehow combine the use of the puppet pin with the basic animation I already had...

To my great surprise, it actually looks as if it will work!

Because the bulk of the animation is being driven by keyframes, all the puppet pin is doing is bending and warping the wing as it moves. It doesn't really interfere at all and you still get a great degree of control over the animation whilst allowing a great degree of flexibility in the joints.

Still a great deal of problems with it at this point — the wing, as it comes down, looks to me as if it's going forward too much. I feel that the base of the wing should come more directly downwards and the tip needs to drag behind a little. Same with the upstroke — the middle section of wing should move first, the tip dragging. 

Still, I think it might work, as long as I keep playing around with it.

Version 4 is REALLY similar to V3 so I won't bother with it... ;)

Version 5

It probably looks worse by itself, but once we get the head and body movement going I think it could work quite nicely!

Timing's getting there I think, still not totally happy with the upstroke. I think it the upmost position is perhaps rotated a little too far back — needs to be more vertical maybe?

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 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.