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.