Background characters 3

Today I started animating my last scene of background characters. So far I have sketched out the frames which shows two characters at a fruit stand, I can now start working on the final piece of animation for these frames, I can then finally start working on the animation for the bird.

Background characters 2

Today I finished my second scene of background character animation, which showed two men making an exchange of a package with each other. A lot of my influence for this animation comes from the Looney Tunes animator Ben Washam who had a smooth flowing style with his characters. His characters were never static and it looks like the joints are all fluent. I am also trying to make my scenes look alive and have atmosphere, firstly by making the characters move continuously. By using an fbf style I can hopefully achieve this in the same way Ben Washam did.

 I can now start working on animating the bird flying through these scenes created so far. Next will be the scenes which show the bird trying to cheer up the grumpy man, this will mix with the music I have chose because It has an energetic sound to it. This is how I want to show the bird in the animation. My next post will show my progress on animating the bird.

Background characters

I worked on my second scene today, which involved more background character movement in order to develop the happy atmosphere. This scene involves a man handing a box to another man. I chose this scenario in order to show the every day normal routine of the characters. To create this scene I am using an fbf style of animation. I finished the animation for the character handing over the box, but I am still making the final drawings for the character taking the box. 

Depending on my progress I may do a few more scenes of other characters interacting with each other to develop the scene more. Then I will move on to the main story of the bird and the grumpy man.

My idea

For my 2D animation I chose the song Bird Cage by Camille Saint-Saens to go along with the story. I am taking the literal movement of the song and using an animating a bird in the story. The plot of this story is about a small town where everyone is happy except for one man. The bird which will feature in the story will try to cheer him up throughout the story. The grumpy man only becomes more annoyed with the birds feeble attempts to make him happy and eventually wants to dispose of the bird.

I am using a frame by frame (fbf) style of animation for this and will be trying to achieve smooth flowing movement with the characters. Before starting the animation I made an animatic which goes over the basic idea of how the story will go, I used Adobe Flash to create this and made simple drawings in time with the music.

This image is the start of my animatic, which is a landscape shot to develop the scene, from there it goes through the character animation. Once I completed this I began the final animation, I first created a rough background for the opening scene, and then started the character animation which I always do first before creating the final backgrounds. 

 The story is set in an old looking village with a friendly atmosphere in order to emphasise the lonely nature of one man in a bundle of positive people.

 My first task was to create various characters in a bright outdoor scene to show the lively atmosphere. So that when the scene changes to the grumpy man the audience will know he is different. This image on the right is how far I am right now with the opening scene, all these characters have happy facial expressions and the scene is beginning to look lively. The next scene will be the bird flying into the grumpy mans house to try cheer him up.

To create the walk cycles of the characters I first drew a rough walk cycle with no colour or features. Once that was done I began drawing the final look of the character over the rough sketch. To make a smooth walk cycle I used onion skin and a smooth brush setting. The difficult part with creating a walk cycle is making it repeat correctly without breaking the illusion of the walk being continuous. I used ten frames and then made it loop. I then used the same process with all the other charcters in this scene. 

In my next post I hope to be done with this opening scene and animating the bird. Look forward to posting my progress with this assignment.