So this is gonna take me longer than expected- regret

I coloured the first frame, colouring surprisingly didn't take too long, that's the fun bit. Animating these over complicated characters ic the long bit.Like oh my god the regret XD.... it does look pretty though, so at least there's that.

At least I know how they look roughly with the background i made.... awesome :3

OH MY GOSH I AM SO DUMB!

So
You know my last post where i wrote how lame backgrounds were and that i didnt care much for them.

I am a fool.
A CHANGED WOMAN!!

I decided to add in the background to see how it looked and BOOM!! at lest 20% better just by doing that- mind blown!!

Have a look and you'll see!

BACKGROUNDS!!! (about damn time charlotte!!)

After Ali posted her blog link in the chat for feedback i felt instant shame. She'd done soooo much work!!
so, taking a leaf (quite literally as she put a leaf in her background and played with the colours (hahaha (spoilers if you haven't read ali's blog yet, she did that) ) ) out of her book I decided to do a similar thing.
I tend to avoid backgrounds, I'm not very good and instead of working on it, i run away from it instead.
but i did it,
i drew it, played around with some filters and colours,

This is the background with no filters or anything altered to it.

 I darkened this one and added an orangy-red hue to it, I wanted to make it seem like there was fire about somewhere... it wasn't very successful XD.

 It then hit me to add a shadow under the house because i am an idiot and i am slow on these things.

This one looks very orangy,

and this one i dont like at all.

Maybe I shouldve added my character's to the background to see how they looked in it....

I took a book out of a lot of disney 2d animations where the background it often line less and painted in. Mine does not look that way at all... but I managed to get the lineless part right at least....

I felt like because my characters are very monochrome with very little colour, my backgrounds should have a little bit more colour to it. I also felt that Nim's life and world should be more colourful and vibrant than Tcosta's. Tcosta lives in a structured city with loads of rules, social expectations and regulations. There is limited freedom and creativity in his world in comparison to Nim's.

TIME TO ANIMATE!

I decided to animate this section here. I wanted to do so because it features both my characters. I felt that it was a cute tender moment where I'd need to explain and tell a lot without any dialogue.
I've only done little ball and stick men to help me get the timing for the first bit, Once I'm happy with the timing I'll start out drawing the key frames and move onto the inbetweens etc..
I think I'm gonna work on my backgrounds now, give my mind a little break from animation.
As I was animating, i realised that to give Tcosta the wight of his body i needed to give the shot more time, make it longer or the information would happen too quickly for the audience. Placing my animatic as a video layer in photoshop was helpful but I will need to update my animatic and storyboard because i just need a few more frames.

I've got something- Finally!

I had to stop myself halfway through, well more like 3/4 of the way through because I started adding in more screams and it got kinda scary.
I do like the music though! It changes mood and pace so well with my piece.
Does need polishing though, again, I did stop towards the end as unfortunately i have a lot of feelings. :/

Playing with noise

I've been recording a lot of Foley sound for my animatic. Fore fire I rustled a lot of wrappers and paper, I also followed Ali around with the Zoom because she had a cough. It was nasty for her but it would gold dust for my piece.
After talking to Chris Mann, he suggested that I should look into apple-loops for some music, percussion especially. He also said I should source a scream online so that it is much more impactful.
I also realised that my piece is very weak in the mid-range section, it lacks the rumble which you would normally get with fire and with folks running around gettin' squished by trees.

I killed a baby with a tree

I eventually got there and remembered to put in a time code, my animatic is now double in length- WOW! It's crazy how adding a few more shots here and there changes the entire viewing experience.
well.. it adds a lot more context to the scenario. I think it also develops Tcosta's character so much more because now it is clear that he is making a huge and weighty decision. The audience may not know what the decision is but they are able to dicier the fact that he is running from something, or running away from something more like.

so....i killed a baby (and redid my storyboards, well... added some more)