Doom Clouds

Reference for that shot I did earlier.  I see how I need to adjust the matte painting based upon where Ayu is supposed to be standing (the transparent plank) and the bus stop post.  The nice thing about this is that it actually makes my work easier in a way.

After those previous shots this one went by like a breeze. I should animate only wide shots from now on.

Nothing to say today.  I'm stopping to eat a late dinner before work tomorrow.  I'll leave this here too, since it's what I was listening to when I stopped: http://youtu.be/ALfjaHF2jYY

Very little has changed in this shot so far.  I've only tweaked existing frames.  I did was raise the hemline and shorten the jacket by a couple inches to match the rest of the film, and gave the skirt a little more of a bell shape, as well as a few fold lines.  I also made Ayu's head slightly bigger to make sure she's 6 heads tall.  Generally I hope more shots are sorta like this, because I'd like to preserve (in this case) as much of Tori's original coloring work as possible.  Of course I'm probably going to have to color this times 3 more frames since I'm about to inbetween this shot to bring it up from 3s (8 frames per second in the film) to 1s or my typical variable timing method (I think I had a professor say it's the "European timing system"?  Either way, typically most American animators prefer to hold a single frame rate per shot, but as I've seen in both Japanese and European Animation, sometimes this seems a little unnecessar

So like I said before, I felt that perhaps more drawings needed to be added to the animation of Ayu...so I did just that- and the result are smoother ease-ins and better timing all around that I feel takes the animation from just being animated to feeling more like a living picture. BEHOLD. Now I just need to After Effects the two together and sync up the audio.  

So I've gotten around to finishing up these two bits of animation.  Ayumi's head took an incredible amount of labor for the amount of animation that came out of it.  Ezri's bit of animation was a lot of fun though.  As usual the next step in these is to color and shade the frames.  I do have some background work to tweak for this shot too.  Despite the lack of broad movement, this was actually one of my most challenging bits of drafting/animation so far.  There are approximately 50 drawings for Ezri and 30 some for Ayumi (and looking at this I may have to go back and add more).  Hopefully I can be more efficient in the future.