Animating...

Animating...and procrastinating...and slowly turning into a caveman...yes, MAN.

More complete scene 1...

With the added background colour I made from dye and oil pastels, the character walk cycle refined and the cloud drawings replaced with sumi-e brush clouds I think this result looks pretty good! The detail of everything seems to make the grass, which the character is walking on, stand out...and that's standing out in a bad way!



Unfortunately time is running very low in supply for me so I'll have to prioritise more animation before going back to this scene and re-drawing the grass! I'm about a quarter of the way with my rough animation - it's a tough job but I signed up to do it :)

Yay...3 weeks left?

Scratch animation test

So I'm still kinda unsure about my animation methods which is quite frustrating...I have in my head the idea that I will work efficiently by first animating roughly in Toon Boom, exporting all the images, tracing over the images with the custom sumi-e brush in Corel Painter, then compositing all the finished elements into Toon Boom Studio or After Effects...

That sounds like a lot more work than it seemed in my head ;_; I think I'll run out of time but if worse comes to worse I'll just polish up the animation drawings directly in Toon Boom Studio. The line work in the film "Le Papillon" looks like brush lines but at the same time it looks so clean and crisp rather like vector animation. I should able to experiment with the pressure sensitivity of my tablet and the vector brushes to create a similar brush line to "Le papillon" but it will not look as organic as the Painter brush.

For now, here's the first scene of the film animated in rough - there's slow panning clouds, wind-swept leaves in the foreground and a walk cycle. It looks a bit sparse at the moment (since it's so incomplete) but hopefully after a bit of work here and there it'll begin to take shape properly :)



I may or may not stretch out this scene so that the title appears at the beginning in the clouds...

Final Storyboard

Finally completed the storyboard and I am a lot happier with it :)

Though, I have just realised the entire film is now set outdoors so there is no need to use the different colour backgrounds. Oh well, the blue colour was my favourite anyway! Now to animate - I will animate everything in rough in Toon Boom Studio first and then I'll export the images and trace over them in Painter. I'm not sure I'll have the time for this but hopefully things will work out in the end...