This week I started animating some of the scenes allocated to me from working on the storyboards. I started off with the park scene as that had the most lip synching, which I had anticipated as being the most labour intensive process. I am not all that accustomed to lip synching in 2D Animation, having only really had prolonged experience working on 3D character rigs as a part of responsive, so going into this shot I was expecting some sort of challenge.
I started off with a fairly simple animatic, outlining the key poses and timings in Photoshop which I would then use as reference for the final character animation, which I would also create in Photoshop. However, my peers gave me feedback on my animatic before I moved on ahead with the final animation. Tess had qualms about the homeless man carrying the large bag over his shoulder. She thought this was too comic, and that Keith should be the focus of the comedy, with the characters and world around him playing the straight man in order to emphasise his ridiculousness as a character. After some reflection and initial resistance to the idea, I eventually agreed with her. She suggested something a little more subtle and in the background, so I came up with the idea to have the silhouette of a homeless man in the background of the shot picking up rubbish; a sort of sad reminder. The homeless man picks up what looks to be a can from the ground and inspects it, taking a swig to see if there is anything left inside it. His body posture suggests there is not, and the man, now defeated by his predicament, resigns to his knees helplessly. This all plays out in the background of the shot in 4-5s, while the main character Keith is addressing the camera.
As for Keith animation, I used the Kyle T brushes for the line work and colouring, which took much longer than anticipated due to having to switch between different coloured lines and different sized brushes. I also encountered problems with the size of the Ultimate Pastel Brushes, as the brush seems to have a problem rendering lines below 12px, which I suspect is due to the sample texture used for the brush being around that size by default. To address this I used a slightly different brush to the one outlined in the style sheets, opting for the Pastel Palooza brush over the ultimate pastel. The differences between these brushes isn;t too apparent, but the one I ended up using definitely has a rougher, coarser texture to it, which I feel lends to the aesthetic. For colour I used some of Tess' concept art as reference, using the eyedropper tool to extract colors.
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