Final project: Animation development part 4

 In this blog post I will describe my animating process on scenes 10 and 11 from my storyboard. 

Scene 10 is a scene showing the dog wandering by himself on a street, while being sad.

In this scene I decided to animate mostly the background to show the movement. I have not used this technique before, therefore I was a little bit worried of how it would turn out. Of course, I could not just let the dog stand there without moving his legs and just slide him. That would be very unnatural. To avoid that mistake I decided to animate the legs of the dog just moving one leg to the front and back and then the other and then also slowly animate background to try to use a new, different technique. 

Here is one of the frames from this particular scene: 

For this scene, I have used the brush tool and 

I think it looks really nice and fairly similar to the storyboard. As I have mentioned in my previous posts, it is very important that the images and the storyboard look alike and that I do not change plans while creating. Change of plans is definitely something normal and it happens often, however when working professionally in an animation studio I need to be able to follow an outline and the main plan. 

As mentioned before here I have concentrated only on animating the legs and the background, 

Scene 11 was a little bit more complex because once again I had to encounter a walk cycle. I have explained the basic of creating a walk cycle in a previous animation post, to access that blog post click here. This time I knew what mistakes I created before, therefore I knew how to avoid them.

This is an image from my storyboard on scene 11. As I mentioned above, this once again is a walk cycle. What was a mistake in my previous walk cycle was the fact that there was a frame where all feet (both human's and dog's) were touching the ground. That is something very unnatural and that was my mistake. I am glad I am able to identify what went wrong and how to fix it. Here when doing the walk cycle, I strongly payed attention to this element and made sure the moment I put one paw on the ground, the other one is starting its movement in that very same frame. 

Here is a single frame from this scene. I am very happy with the walk cycle itself. One thing to improve in the future is trying to stay consistent with the size of things throughout the frames. I am aware I made the dog oddly small from the first frame in this scene to the last. It does not have to be seen as a mistake, I could have meant for the dog to move diagonally front and its left, then the dog would indeed get smaller. I know it was not my intention, however it is not something the viewer must know. 

When those two scenes were ready, I rendered them and imported them to IMovie, where I attached them to the rest of my animation already created. 

Here are the two scenes attached to some of the previous scenes: 

I am satisfied with how it is coming along. I know it should have a little bit more frames to make it smoother, however with the time given, I still think I am doing an extremely good job. Of course it will look a lot more appealing when I add sound and music to the background, but as I mentioned before, sound is the last step.