Shot progress

Over the break I have been making progress with my individual shots for the animation. Below is the shot I've been working on the most recently. I am quite happy with how it is looking but i would like to add more in betweens to a few of the movements to make them smoother and more natural- for example the spider legs and when my character turns her head. I also intend to add some smoke effects to the shot, but at the minute I am focusing on finishing my other shots first. 

Shot 1

This week I began making progress on one of the first shots of the animation. In this shot, we see the character for the first time as a silhouette appearing on the other side of a window. I went about this by using the following reference video from youtube. I found it easier to understand the walk cycle and get it right by drawing the entire body, despite the fact that you wont be able to see below the waist in the finished shot. I have never done a walk cycle from this view before, but thanks to the reference video i found it much easier, and then added the details like the spider legs and hair to show the character.

Walk Cycle Progress

This week i have been focusing on the shot i keyframed of the spider ladys walk cycle, mainly adding more detail and the characters characteristics, but i still have to add more details and clean it up alot. I am however happy with how its looking and the progress Ive made. I struggled a bit with keeping the details consistent in each frame, like the hair and dress, but i went through and re did it and now i think they are more or less consistent. I also am pleased with how the movement of her dress is looking; watching Jessica Rabbit reference videos really helped with that to see how the movement should look. I am spending quite a lot of time on this scene because i really want it to look right.

This is how it looks at the moment.

Character and narrative key frames

I have begun keyframing some of Spindra the spider characters actions. I found the walk cycle particularly difficult because of the angle of the background and i had never done a walk cycle like ths before.

Jessica Rabbit research

I have found researching Jessica Rabbit very helpful in animating and designing Spindra, the sexy spider character in our animation. She has been especially helpful when i was struggling with my characters walk cycle, and when observing how her dress and hair should move. I learned how to make my characters walk more exaggerated and sexy from studying the scenes she appears in in "Who Framed Rodger Rabbit" and also used her character design sheets as inspiration when designing my own character. I found the sexy walk difficult to get right but these videos helped me alot, even though my walk is not as exaggerated as in the film.

Backgrounds

After some deliberation, I have decided to use the backgrounds I created in Maya by themselves and not to paint over them. Painting over them proved to be very time consuming, especially because i wanted to keep the lighting effect I had acheived using Maya, and in the end some of the ones i painted over simply looked worse than the maya screenshots. I also received feedback from peers about how much they liked my backgrounds and now feel confident enough to use them in the final animation. I also think this may make the 2D animated parts of the animation work better alongside Alice's 3D flashback part, perhaps making the switch from 2D to 3D less jarring. I regret having spent some time painting over the backgrounds but I have learned from this mistake.