Oksana comes to life! Here's a Flash movie of the first walk cycle for Oksana. It's her 'snow walk.' She lifts her boots and clomps them down in the snow. A walk cycle is simply a series of images that show the different body positions for a complete 2-step walk cycle. So if the character starts off with their right foot in the air ready to hit the ground forward of them, the cycle goes through that step and continues on through the other foot lifting and hitting the ground, until the cycle comes back to the original foot in the air just like it was in the very first position. This series of images can be repeated to give the illusion that the character is walking. For this movie clip, I have added all sorts of background and foreground images. These must all move along past the character so that it looks as if the character is traveling forward. When she stops, all the scenery images must stop with her. I do this by putting my different pieces of art work on different layers in Flash. I can then make each layer move at a different speed. So, layers of grass and pine branches that are closer to the viewer move by a little faster than the layers in the background.
Also, the overall atmosphere of the film is starting to solidify into something I am more comfortable with. That is why I wanted to do much more than a simple walk cycle in this clip.
This picture is just something to show for today. It's a rough try at the little town for the beginning of the movie. I made a painting of the hills and sky in the background. Then I pulled that into Flash and made layers on top of it where I drew a little town and some trees in the foreground. This is sort of what I want but not quite. I am beginning to really try things with combining the paintings and the more cartoonish drawings done in Flash. I'm not sure that this works. It may require making the foreground trees look painted like the background hills.
Today I've made a painted version of the Oksana family home sketch I drew yesterday. What I did was pull the photograph of yesterday's sketch into the ArtRage paint program as a tracing layer. Then I followed the original with the program's pencil tool. After that, I made many layers for the different colors of paint and filled it all in. It is important to get comfortable with using very thin watery layers of paint. For instance, the roof of the house is painted on three layers. One for the pencil lines of the straw, one for the dark brown paint, and one for the light tan paint. Using layers, I don't have to be too careful not to mess up what I've already painted on another layer.
This is a new sketch of Oksana's family home. If you look at the shot of the house at the beginning of the storyboard movie, you will see certain similarities, but the house is starting to take on a more rustic appearance. Also, the entire scene has less of a storybook quality in this sketch and is actually getting a little more lonely and sinister in tone.
At this point it should be obvious that I am in no hurry to finish this film. I am fully engaged in a battle to carve out the reality of the film. This fight with my undisciplined imagination, distractions, vague notions of what will look good, clumsy drawing skills, shifting impressions of a scene, an incomplete understanding of nature, too little observation of real objects, constant profound worries about how I will make all the characters actually move, and simple fatigue is the fight that will refine and hone the movie until it becomes obvious how it will all work together. You must be willing to get into this fight if you want to make something. You don't need to fight if you are going to advertise breakfast cereal with a cartoon. But you will need to fight if you are going to make something to be seen by that person who you imagine to be your most intelligent and perfect audience member. You must always make your movie for this super-person who understands all and sees all there is to see. This ultimate judge of your movie never has to pay to see your movie. This person gets in free and you never know when they are going to show up. So you must be ready.
This is a background image of the inside of Oksana's house combined with a fast sketch of her stepmother and a keyhole. It's an effort to try putting together the elements shown in the last three sketches I added to the storyboard the other day. It's a kind of mental exercise to try and see if the design ideas for the artwork can start working to build a real scene. This is all really a gradual working up of the entire concept. I'll will start to trust the way I'm drawing things more if I can sometimes see them working together.
Three more shots added to storyboard. I'm fussing with the faces since these are close-ups. I may be leaning too much toward realism with the father's face but that's alright for now. There's nothing wrong with experimenting in a storyboard. It's only paper.
These three shots were harder than the prior ones. There's one thing I'm confident of and that's my effort to get emotions to show. I want these characters to live and to be unmistakably real. The finished storyboard will ultimately tell me whether or not I can achieve this and whether or not I actually want to go ahead and make the movie.
Click the button below to see these three shots added to the storyboard movie.
Here are eight more shots that have been added to the storyboard film. It only took me about an hour and a half to accomplish these. I'm getting faster. The reason for that is because I'm getting more comfortable with my impressions of the scenes in the story. I've pretty well figured out how I want the characters to look and that informs every storyboard drawing because now I have an instinctive feel for how each person moves and how they express different emotions. I am also getting more comfortable with my scenic thinking. In other words, I am starting to move the point of view or the camera around for different angles and compositions.
First up tonight is the most recent pencil sketch I did of the stepmother character. This was completed about two hours ago. It's full of erasures and mistakes but it is finally getting at the core of the character as I see her.
Here is what she looks like when I go into Flash and draw her directly with the pen tablet and then color her.
And here is the little family posing for us out in the cold.
So, now I think I feel pretty happy with the way my characters look. I'll continue tomorrow with the storyboard and as I draw the scenes there I'll get better and better at visualizing my characters from different angles.
I am making an animated movie in Flash. It's called 'The Visit'. It's a frightening fairy tale. I'm blogging the whole production. You will see all the story ideas, storyboards, sketches, backgrounds, animatics, problems, tests... everything. Who knows how it will turn out?
If you are new here, you should really start with the first post from April 17, 2007. This a step-by-step process so you won't want to miss the earlier posts.
