Hello guys and girls and chaps and chappettes, been smashing away at the chase scene. Andy suggested adding some slight rotation/wobble to the body to give it a little more life — similar to what we had in the original animatic! It took a while to figure it out but I finally managed to come up with something:
Version 20
No head or anything as yet, as I wanted to ensure the body was looking good without any distractions... I think it's getting there, most definitely, and adding the wobble really does improve the whole thing.
The next challenge was the head. I asked Andy for some advice on what it should be doing and he suggested having it slightly follow the orientation of the body but delay it slightly, by just a few frames — so that as it rotates one way the head is just slightly lagging behind. It's quite tricky to accomplish in such a short amount of frames but I'm going to keep playing around with it.
We spent a fairly frustrating afternoon trying to figure out exactly what the head should be doing — we tried about a million different things but only a few of them seemed weren't too painful to look at. We've still not reached a decision on the head so I'm posting up a few of the ones we came up with so you guys can examine them in your own time and see if you can come up with any ideas...
Version 21
In this first version there was no rotation or anything applied to the head — simply an up/down forward/backward sort of bobbing going on. I thought it might be an idea to try and get an idea of the vertical movement before worrying too much about any rotations and such — proving to be trickier than I thought. It's quite difficult to figure out how the head should be moving in this scene. In an ordinary walk cycle a bird's head is kept mostly still, mostly level, until the body moves ahead and the head thrusts to catch up as the bird steps down. This is quite tricky to achieve in this sort of cycle... obviously the movement of the legs is a little different, and it's hard to figure out whether the head would stay level or should be pushed up/down by the body. Here we've just got it opposing the body — travelling downwards as the body rises and then moving upwards as the body drops (effectively keeping it level). The head bobs forward as the body is at the highest point. I'm not sure if it really makes any sense? Perhaps it will look better if we can figure out the rotation?
Version 22
This one's pretty much the opposite of the above version — the head bobs forward and moves down as the feet go down, more like in a conventional bird walk cycle. I think it looks, er... really weird though. Doesn't seem to work. At all.
Version 23
Here, on version 22, I've tried applying Andy's suggestion (with a slight alteration) — I copied the rotation of the body but rather than shifting it to the right, I simply reversed the rotation of the head. Unfortunately I don't know if the exact rotation will work with the head — it gives it this weird sort of round and round motion. Just looks a bit peculiar.
I don't know. I think the problem, as we identified earlier, is that the head is a little too... mechanical. The body, legs and feet are all moving continuously in quite a rapid, frantic motion and in contrast the head is quite controlled and steady. It's just difficult trying to figure out exactly what to do with it.
It's a tricky one, to be sure. If you guys have any suggestions or ideas of your own please let me know! :]
Tuesday, 24 April 2012
[Scene 00] Alternative Opening v3
Scene 00 Alternative Opening v3
And here's the version produced today. With a lot of help and lighting advice from Andy we managed to come up with very nice visual depth. I also played around with the ripples a bit more, once again Andy stepped in and suggested a Mesh Warp effect for the ripple which worked really nicely. All I need now are the puppets then I can continue with it :]
This kind of lighting effects will be something I'm going to apply to all of my sequences. It really does make a difference and I'm encouraging everyone to do the same. We don't want the backgrounds to be too much like the original photoshop file, so add some lighting guys!
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 ;]
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 ;]
Sunday, 22 April 2012
[Scene 00] Alternative Opening v2
Here's version numero dos. I took on board Alex's suggestions from the previous version and shortened the beginning by one second, made drop of the water quicker, easy eased the pan and altered the ripples. The radio waves I used for the effect was limited to when the sizes can change but hopefully this looks slightly better. Give it that subtle change that's noticeable :]
[Scene 00] Alternative Opening v1
I was thinking over how we can make an effective opening. Something with a little bit of difference from the camera movement we've done before. Because Andy had mentioned something about water drops falling at the corner of the barn's wall I was taken back to how 'A Bug's Life' was opened. So I researched a little bit on water ripple effects in AE and I came up with this for starters.
Here's the link to the opening: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrW_TTxP1ow
I like the bird flying by but I think the first bird we need to be introduced to is the crow so I didn't try with that :] There was another suggestion that Andy said and that was to pan across the barn wall and see a very dusty window before we come to the corner. And through the window's dust we barely see the Interior shot, hinting off future events. Now of course that's another idea I'd really like to use ^^
At the end is when the scarecrow will sneak around the wall before the crow joins him etc. :] I think I might need to change that reflection. I'm not sure whether it looks odd or not. I need another opinion.
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 :]
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 :]
Saturday, 21 April 2012
Scarecrow Run Cycle Test 3 (In Colour)
This is a colored scarecrow run I have done. Just bear in mind that I have enlarged the images yet so the last few frames may look a bit weird. I will do a final test run for the scarecrow as soon as possible.
This is the cycle bit which can be repeated as many times as you want just in case that we need to extend the whole running movement in the animation.
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