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 ;]

Scene 11 V11 — V13

Hey guys!

Following my previous post here're the first few attempts at getting those wings onto the crow. I'm afraid that, even though it's a relatively simple thing, it's actually been causing me some problems. I don't know if it's just where I'm so tired but I'm just having trouble trying to figure out exactly what they should be doing...

Version 11



First attempt — not too sure, it just seems really off to me. I think it might be because the shoulders seem too static — also, perhaps I got the movement of the wings the wrong way around? they sort of flex upwards as her body rises which I don't think makes too much sense... they should probably flex up as she drops to the ground, where the wind resistance pulls them upwards. Or something...

Version 12



Same sort of thing, only now the wings are slightly spread which might look a little better. I definitely need to limber up those shoulders a bit. Again, some problem — think the wings are backwards — they flex outwards as she rises up rather than the other way around.

Version 13



Sort of a combination — tried to speed up the wings a little to make them slightly more frantic and got them to sort of bend backwards/downwards as she rises. I think it makes more sense but it still looks REALLY weird to me — something about the wings just doesn't match up with the whole scene. Maybe it's where I've been staring at it so long but it just seems really hard to watch? Seems to be a lot going on — maybe with the wings it's just too "busy"?

I'll keep playing around with it a little, but any critique or thoughts are more than welcome... as always :]

Scene 07 V11, V12 & V13

Andy gave me some feedback regarding the crow's walk cycle today — he pointed out that it looked a bit weird with the crow's head turned fully away from the camera like that, almost like I'd forgotten to draw the beak! I totally agree with him and it was something I'd kept thinking about all the while I was making it.

He suggested having the crow looking slightly upwards as she entered, so you could still see the beak, then have her turn her head around and downwards. I had a quick go at knocking some alternatives together so have a look and let me know what you think.

I did encounter some slight problems with having her look upwards as she entered. The head kept breaking away from the neck and rotating it so far up caused the head bobbing to look really freakin' weird so I've done my best with it. I'm sure there are things I can do to fix it up, so this is just to give you an idea...

I also did a few versions with her simply facing slightly more towards the camera... which kinda looks a bit better.

V11



This one's recycled — she doesn't look into the air, as said above, she's just got her head turned slightly more towards us.

V12



Slight variation on the above, but with a slightly more turned away head. I think the head looks a bit weird on this one, but I think it's just the crappy way I drew it...!

V13



Mm, I don't know about this one. I had difficulty keeping it properly aligned with the neck — the head's got some position keyframes on it and pushing those forward so that it sits in line with the neck caused it to be a bit jerky. I think it looks a bit peculiar.

I don't really know what to do about it at this stage — I've been staring at it so long I've gone a bit blind!!

I did have another thought — I think maybe I misunderstood Andy — maybe he meant keep using the backwards-facing head but simply attach a beak poking out of it, pointing slightly into the air? I'll give it a go and see how it looks!

Scene 16 V8

Version 8



I tried removing the weird blur from the head as she looks back down after catching the bug, as well as creating a few more heads for the turn itself. I think it looks a lot better now! I'm still not totally happy with the head toss at the beginning though — again, I think it's the blur — probably not needed but I'm not sure. The inbetween head I made is ridiculous, though, and doesn't make any sense, so I blurred it to cover it up... maybe if I fix it up a little it will look better. I'll have a play around with it and see what I can do! :]

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?

Scene 16 V5

Scene 16



Ugh, another surprisingly tricky one. Few things I'm not really happy with in terms of timing — the beak snapping shut being one of them (too slow?).

I really don't like the head as it comes back down - the blur isn't necessary as she turns her head back, but it looks choppy and ridiculous without it. I think I just need to make more heads, maybe have her face towards the camera a little more?

Overall I think she should be a little quicker though, bit too slow and evenly timed at the moment. Doesn't really move much like a bird. Still, it's a start!

Oh... and don't mind the background, I know it's different to the previous scene; not even started messing with that yet ;]

Scene 14 V2 & V3

Though this was a scene marked "easy" on our timetable, it took me an embarrassingly long time to get it right... mostly the silhouette puppet.

Scene 14


Version 2



I had some difficulty getting the speed and timings of various things right, most notably the "lunge" forward - the zoomy bit. I'm still not 100% sure on it — I decided to try that trick with the black and white flash frames again to try and give it a bit more "oomph," but I dunno. How's it looking so far?

Version 3



For some reason I've saved a V3 but it doesn't look much different. I know I must have changed it, otherwise I wouldn't have versioned it, but the only difference I see is that the sun moves slightly in this one. I'd like to get some sort of sun glare going and give the crow a bit of glow around the edges, to really emphasize that we're looking through the scarecrow's eyes — that the sun is really, really bright and the crow is just this huge black shape.

Scene 07 V5

Skipping forward a few versions here — I've played around a little with the timings and whatnot. The crow turns her head a little sooner and spends a bit more time looking in the direction of the camera which I feel works a little better. It's kinda hard to tell at this stage, but I kind of feel like she should carry on walking a bit longer, closer towards the right hand side of the screen? It's hard to say — I imagine it might look a bit different once it's actually put in sequence. Still, I might have her carry on walking, just so we have a bit more time to play with.

The shot is supposed to be 5 seconds long but the crow is actually only on-screen for about 3 - 4 seconds, so I'll simply add in a bit of delay before she actually enters the screen.

Anywho, I've fixed up the head just a little and stopped it breaking away from the body. I also cleaned up the edges a bit and centred the head so it doesn't drift too far away from where the neck should be. I think it's looking a lot better!

The other big change is the addition of lighting effects — it's very simple so far and it looks kinda bad! I made two sets of light beams so that the crow appears to pass in between them, but I want to have them interact with her body a bit more as well as make that shadow a bit more dynamic. I also would like to have some illumination or shadows on the ground cast from the wall of crops but we'll see how we go.

There's also a subtle lens flare to act as a sun that drifts slowly to the right — not sure how noticeable it is. I was also thinking of maybe having some tiny black insects flitting about near the bottom of the screen, just to add a bit more detail. I don't know. What do you guys think? Any suggestions? :]

Scene 07 V1

Hey guys! Been amending the crow's walk cycle as according to Andy's feedback and I started putting it together in the scene file, so here's what I've got so far...



It's still pretty basic and there are still a lot of problems but I'm feeling pretty satisfied so far. Went through a horrible moment of panicking that I'd have to re-do it all...!

I've tried to fix the sliding foot issue and also made her lift her leg slightly higher so the toes don't drag along the ground like they did before. It's looking a bit better but I think the toes need to bend inward a little sooner as she lifts her leg — I dunno how well you can see it but they stay in the same position as she picks her leg up which looks a bit weird!

Andy also suggested making her steps a little smaller, and after careful consideration I decided not to. Smaller, more "skippy" steps would be more characteristic of something smaller, like a blackbird or sparrow — crows are hulking great things and they do have quite large, clunky steps. So I've decided to keep it this way... sorry Andy...!

He did suggest having the tail bob around a bit as she moves, which I definitely plan on doing now that the legs are mostly sorted.

Anyway, this is very clearly unfinished — some layering issues (she walks on top of the bushes) and I'd like to get some fancy-shmancy lighting effects going (like some sunbeams or something) just to give it a little more depth. Oh, and the crow's head needs to look around of course... just figured I'd show you all so far so's you don't think I'm being a lazy bugger :]

Crow puppets #3

I really need to come up with better post titles!

Been slogging away with the puppets today but I think I've managed to make some fair progress. I think that most of the roughs are done by this point — the only puppets left to make are the jumping/running one, the "scary crow" silhouettes and possibly one for grabbing the bug (if we aren't able to re-use one).

Then of course I've got to refine and amend them as necessary — make sure they're articulated properly, fix all the problems, etc.

So here's what I've got so far...

You'd better believe this was the hardest thing I've ever done. It took me four billion years and I think you'll agree that it's the Mona Lisa of the After Effects puppet world. Maybe even the Sistine Chapel.

... seriously though. ;] pretty simple, no articulation (didn't think it needed it). I also composited it onto Jazzy's backdrop, to check the outline thickness:

I'm not quite sure it's reading very well, as the crow and the backdrop are quite dark? I did create an extra layer with a thicker outline that we can use if need be... maybe if the crow was bigger?

I did notice, though, that this backdrop isn't wide enough to fit a 1024x576 canvas — it's only 801 pixels! :S Do you have a larger version, Jazzy...?

The next one is one I've admittedly been avoiding — sounds a bit stupid but I found it quite tricky! I'm still not 100% happy with it — but it's a start. 

Biggest problem is the face. It looks really off to me — I think the facial features are too big and are sitting a bit far up the head. I think I need to shrink them and move them down a bit?

I've not yet figured out how we're going to animate the head turning. I thought I might just make a couple of beaks and eyes then kind of slide them across the face?

And the last one I've been working on is one that, again, I was avoiding because it was awkward — the dreaded forward run cycle...!

Yeah... I think the hair is a bit too crazy... I need to fix that! :S But I finally managed to figure that beak out! Though I didn't reference it directly, I was thinking a lot about the faces in Chicken Run and how the cheeks on those characters moved — must have helped 'cause I think the face is looking a lot better now.

I'm really not sure how well the puppet's going to animate at all — definitely something I'm going to have to test. The poses above are quick mockups — obviously we can spend more time getting the weight and positioning right, it was really just to see if the feet fit onto the body. Sorry about the outstretched foot, I know it looks really awkward (one of the toes is too small!) — I'll definitely have a crack at fixing it soon.

That's me done! I am, however, going to leave you with some nightmare fuel.

SOULS

Sleep tight ;D

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 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

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.

Puppet pose planning and reference

Starting to develop more puppets and thinking about how best to articulate each one. It's much trickier than you'd think; despite the crow's relatively simple design there are a lot of body parts to consider. I've been trying to think economically in terms of re-using as many pieces as possible whilst still maintaining lively and expressive poses and overall quality of animation.

I started with a fairly simple pose from a scene that doesn't require a great deal of movement in the crow — right at the end, when she's perched on the scarecrow, holding the bug in her beak. If done correctly, this pose could potentially be re-used for the scene where she actually lunges forward and grabs the bug from his hat as well. 

It looks totally awful at the moment — it's those blinking wings. I have a basic understanding of their overall structure and mechanics, but trying to rotate them and picture the folding from such a weird angle is incredibly difficult. The one at the top would probably work but I just really wasn't happy with it. The angle isn't quite right, really — the scene in question is more of an over-the-shoulder shot, whereas that one's a little more side-on. It could be used for the bug-grabbing scene, however! 

On the top left is the sketch from the 'above' puppet I posted previously. Nothing to say there.

It was pretty hopeless trying to completely imagine how the wings might fold so I compiled a bunch of beautiful reference images pilfered from Flickr! I opted to grab pictures of regular birds as well as crows — partially because there weren't many images of crows from the angle I wanted. The one on the far-right of the middle row is probably the most useful for my purposes, so it's the one I focused on most.

From the references I was able to scribble something that made a bit more sense — it took me a few tries and it's still far from perfect. I was using a poor-quality printout, however, and it was pretty difficult to see too much detail to reference. I started having real trouble with the head at this point — I tried hiding more of the beak behind the head to better suggest the angle but it just looked a bit peculiar. I think I finally sort-of got it though?

I'm not going to worry too much about the detail of the sketch at this point. It's really just to provide a base to work from — it will be much easier to correct all the horrible mistakes digitally.

I also started thinking a bit more about the wings and flight cycle at this point and how we might go about animating that with nothing but puppets as painlessly as possible.

As before, I started digitally sketching the base of the puppet in Photoshop. The reference on-screen was much clearer and easier to see so it was much easier to get the angle of the wings correct.

I also replaced the original head with one of the others that I had drawn, which fit the angle of the body much better. 

Once the sketch was complete I started going over it again with the pen tool, creating blocky shapes on each layer for each relevant body part. In retrospect it probably wasn't necessary as the crow isn't going to really move at all, but I figure it's always a good move to have articulated puppets ready just in case.

I had a bit of an issue with the outlines - the normal method of simply "stroking" each section wasn't really going to work in this instance - the way I'd divided up the limbs looked a bit weird when stroked like that. The shapes were a bit clunky and awkward. I would have had to alter a lot of the outlines by hand to make it work, so I opted to just draw them myself. It allowed me to keep a lot of the original detail - I think (hope?!) it looks a bit better this way:

Thinking a little further about the more complex sections of the animation, I started trying to figure out how we might look at doing the crow's run for the hang glider chase scene. In theory, it shouldn't be causing too much problem, as it's mostly actually already animated within the animatic. The difficulty, for me, is knowing how far to take it and how to make it fit within the puppet design. 

The animatic version is a simple two-frame cycle of the crow's legs simply going up and down. There's a bit of keyframing to move her up and down and side to side as she runs. Something like this could probably work reasonably well within the final animation, however I wasn't sure whether or not I should look to making the cycle a little more polished and actually animate the legs properly. One thing I'd considered doing was to have maybe three frames for the feet - one flat on the ground, the other being lifted up, and the other outstretched in front. I thought we could maybe take a simple leg shape and rotate it in 3D space along the Z axis to appear as if it was rotating upwards, lying flat towards the camera, to give the impression that she was lifting her leg. As the leg rotated the "lifted" foot could be used, switching to the "outstretched" foot when her leg is fully extended.

I'd really need to put an example together - it's a bit tricky to explain...!

I've started loosely sketching out a potential puppet, trying to figure out how to not make it look utterly ridiculous. Front angles are tricky at any rate, let alone for bloody birds... No matter what I do her face always looks stupid

I was referring heavily to the crow Jazzy drew for the animatic - it's pretty perfect, I've just got to try and adapt it into the style of the crow puppet.

I really don't know about the beak or anything about the face. I think the top of the beak... the bridge-y nostril bit possibly needs to be wider? The expression looks off. She doesn't look particularly scared. It just doesn't have the charm or humour or simplicity of the original, I just don't know how to make it work. I'm not sure if my leg idea will work either - still, best to try eh?

The last thing I started looking at were wings! Specifically, their application to the scene where the crow leaps into the air and runs from the hang glider. The animatic shows her leaping in shock, looking behind her before turning and bolting. This sounds like it would require a great deal of additional puppets, but I've been thinking about it a bit and I reckon it might be possible to get away with just one, using a couple of additional heads and wings for the jump. The body and legs could be recycled from the side-on run (which is going to be very similar to the walking puppet). We could probably just lift her legs and feet (as shown in the terrible doodles at the top there) and attach a new head and set of wings.

We could potentially animate her wings very similarly to how I did the flying crows - we could use one or two basic wing shapes and simply keyframe them up and down at high speed, then apply a heavy motion blur so all you get is a blurred shape flailing about. Maybe we could even kick her legs and shake her tail a bit!

The question of how to fold her wings back up for when she starts running is a bit trickier. We could probably get away with just adding a blurred mid-pose as she draws them back to her body - the whole movement will be very quick so I think we can get away with being pretty loose with it.

I'll have to do some tests to see whether it will work or not. Hopefully it will!

More crow puppets

Hi guys! In a bit of a rush so this will be a quick post — for once! Just thought I'd show you a few of the puppets I've been tossing together. They're still fairly rough and I've not given the articulation a great deal of thought but hopefully it should give us an idea of what we're working with.

Ridiculously simple — basically the puppet so far for the shot as the shadow creeps over her. I don't know, it almost looks too simple to me — should we be able to see her legs? Her feet? All the essential parts are separate — head, neck, wings, tail — so we won't just be moving her statically. I'll get her head bobbing forward and back and Jazzy suggested moving her wings as well, to act more like human shoulders.

I was trying to figure out the best way to get her to turn her head when she looks up at the hang glider and I'll probably just end up doing a few separate layers showing her head at various angles as she turns it upwards.

These aren't 100% finished but pretty close, I reckon. Just the ending shot where she tosses the bug into the air. I really don't like the last one on the far right — it looks really, really weird to me and I don't know what it is. Something about the head I think?  I've never been very good at 3/4 angles D8;;

You can see that the one with her head tilted upwards as she swallows the bug is nowhere near finished — I need to fix the neck and connect it to the body, fix the beak, get it to open and close and just generally finish it off. I'll make the lump on her throat as she swallows the bug a separate layer so we can animate it really easily and just move it down her neck.

I'd love to hear your suggestions on any aspect of these puppets! Let me know what you guys want changed :]

Crow puppet test V1

Following my last post, here's the result of a little playing around in Photoshop, trying to figure out how to construct the crow puppet for maximum animation potential.

All the pieces (including each section of the wing) are on separate layers, so we can twist and tweak in pretty much all directions as necessary and hopefully get some really nice personality out of it.

Few things I'm not too sure about — I kinda think the outline on the beak/feet could stand to be a little darker? I'm not too sure on the eye colour either... is it too light? Would you prefer a different colour or shade of pupil? 

I'm also not sure how she'll animate, but I'm hoping to test her tomorrow morning and see how it works.

I'm now going to go ridiculously in-depth into how I built the damn thing, so I apologise for being so wordy, but I hope it might be helpful in some way!

I started by roughly sketching out the basic pose for the puppet — I'll be working over the top of this and neatening it up with pen tool shapes to give a crisp outline! 

Once the sketch had been neatened, I used the reference videos to consider which body parts would need to be moveable in order to create convincing movement. I marked each joint with a small circle to give me a better idea of where certain pieces should overlap for the anchor points to be placed. The head and legs are, of course, essential — I also decided it would be nice if the tail and wings were moveable so that we can get some nice bird-like flicks and twitches!

I made the sketch blue (so it would be easier to see the pen tool lines) and started roughly tracing the outline of each shape for the limbs on a separate layer, making sure to encompass each marked joint to allow for smooth rotation. I'm really glad for the body structure research I did beforehand — though I'm far from an anatomical expert on birds, knowing roughly how they're built made it much easier to decide which shapes should be on which layer!

Not much else to say at this stage — I just carried on making and filling shapes on separate layers with the pen tool. I dropped the transparency of each layer for clarity, so I could see how each section was overlapping.

I outlined the head without the hair first, just so I could get a solid underlying structure and make sure that it made sense before adding detail. I decided to do the face independently — this way, if we need to open or close the beak it'll be a smooth opening with no weird gaps in the head.

The beak was a bit tricky — I decided to do the top and bottom halves as separate layers, using the cheek/side of mouth as a sort of hinge. I think that it'll be the bottom half of the beak that moves most, simply because rotating the top beak too much will look a bit weird. It seems as if it's directly attached to her face and moving it around too much wouldn't make a lot of sense — plus it would intersect the head like some sort of weird phantom beak.

The rough outline was mostly complete at this point, but I did a little more tweaking with the hair at the back of the head — the bottom-most spike looks a bit like a weird squashed sausage so I wanted to fix that a bit.

The rear leg was created by simply duplicating the original, shifting it up and to the right and dropping it below the body layers. I then simply gave each section a colour overlay of a slightly darker hue.

It was at this point I started wondering how best to do the outline. Applying a stroke to each layer would outline literally everything, including all of the separate pieces making up the wings and feet, which would look really peculiar. Instead, I decided to give each section an outline on a separate layer. I made selections of each limb — wings, body, head, beak, etc — expanded the selection by 2 and smoothed by 2 pixels. I then created a new layer below all of the solid colours and filled with a darker shade of that colour. It sounds really weird, but having the outline on a brand new layer meant I was free to erase and tweak sections of it as necessary — you see in the image below how the 'shoulder' of the wing is outlined inside of the body. I was able to simply erase this without effecting the rest of the puppet.

And the final product again...

Feedback and criticism is always welcome! :]