For my production research I am going to try a few seconds of a few methods e.g. hand drawn, flash, stop-motion. This should give me an idea of how long each method will take. I also have to sort out the timing and audio. I made a short stick figure animatic which I'm going to post and hopefully get some feedback from you guys.

Obviously there's no audio yet as these are just trials. I made the animatic using flash and I cut it down to 9 seconds so as not to spoil the end (if you haven't seen the storyboard). Ideally it would need a lot longer than the 12 seconds allocated so I'll have to see how it goes and maybe get away with it when editing.

 

The video above is a walk cycle I've been working on. It's fairly basic and needs more work but it's a step in the right direction - get it? Thanks go to Mike for explaining to me the technique involved in using the bone tool. I've tried several times before to create a walk cycle without success. The trick it seems is to import sections of the character, i.e. upper leg, lower leg, foot into the library. These can then be dragged onto the stage and linked together with the bone tool. I had some leg sections saved from the summer project which I used for this trial. I then drew a head and torso which I added motion tween to. I continued adding parts to this character, which you'll see in the next video. This leads me to my next problem. To create the arms I drew ovals and connected them with the bone tool. The trouble is that the stroke lines remain around the ovals, which would not look good on my caveman character. I could make the stroke the same colour as the fill but I want to retain the 'drawn' effect that a black outline gives. 

 

 

This would have been a good walk for Vince in the Pulp fiction project. Kinda funky - like a dance. I'm going to add a background to this video to add to the sense of actual movement.

With regards to the audio I haven't recorded anything yet. I did find out though that there's a pre-recorded library of sounds in flash - thanks Lynda - so I might get something there. There isn't much in the way of conversation in my animation, it's mainly just a few grunts, so they wont be to hard to record, especially in our house.

I also need to do a bit more drawing with regards to the characters. I noticed some differences in the size (torso) of the caveman character in the storyboard, and I want a bit more consistency in the face i.e. from different angles. I think that maybe if they were more ape-like it might add to the setting. This could be achieved easily enough by making the arms longer and the lags shorter.

My next move is to look up Lynda - ahem - to try and discover a way to draw the limbs of my characters without it being obvious that they're composed of separate sections.