'Its never the right time'

After creating my trial animation i realised id have to speed up my animation a lot more than i thought. Trying to fit all of this within 30 seconds is going to be a big squeeze.

LOTS OF SCRIBBLES

CONFUSION!

After making all of these scribbles trying to work out what to actually do with my animation i think that the only option is to cut down/ simplify it. I have decided to cut out the scene where lenny gets handed an umbrella and cant pick it up. Instead i will have him being chased by the cloud for a few seconds longer, then him just spying the umbrella shop.  It will still have the scene with the shop keeper has an idea, but then it will skip straight to lenny skipping away happily.

Close up

There us one point in my animation where there is a close up of Lenny's face, this needed to be more detailed.. well portray an expression better. for this reason i am using more frames of his face. He needs to be looking angry, then change into a sort of startled/ surprised look.

This was made up of 6 frames but i think it shows well enough the lightbulbs expression changing, with anymore frames i don't think it would fit with the music.

final final final beginning.

This is the beginning of my final outcome, well what i need it to look like. I've decided to use the hand drawn version of lenny as i think it stands out behind the background better. 

This is only at 5fps so definitely not as fast as it needs to be but it gives me a good idea of how its going to look. Im not sure if i'm going to use these images exactly because i didn't work out the timings properly but my final images will look practically identical to this.

umbrella shop

I really like the idea of combining photographs in my stop motion animation, along with the lightbulb. This would combine realistic images with the unreal characters and the animated world, i think making it very interesting.

I've decided to use my friend as the model, taking pictures of her with her hands by her side gradually moving upwards, as if she has had an idea.

I only took 6 frames as i had my camera on the burst setting and didnt realise how slow it went. i tried taking pictures one by one but it was very jumpy.

This isn't the best quality and as it is only a short sequence i decided to attempt to create it in after effects..

As you can see my images are too big, obviously not 72dpi.  Im not sure how to change these on here so for now i just had to scale down the image to fit into the frame. 

I set the images to 12 fps and then added a bit of my music track just to see if it works really. obviously not in time.

After rendering and setting as a quicktime output, this is the outcome;

Im definitely going to use this in my final animation. Maybe not this exact clip, but i will find a way to use the images.

beggining of the end..

After the experiments i decided that a plain blue background would be best for the sky of my animation, ive begun to try and get the timings and right amount of frames right per second just so i know if it all works really.

 Not the best set up but i have limited space in my house, so the floor it is. I tried to create a sort of camera holder with tape attatched to a chair but it didnt really work, so my hand was moving all the time. the black tape sort of helped me out but i think ill need something else to really help me keep my camera still and in the same sort of place for my final animation.

Below is what i came out with, i haven't tried to add the music to it yet but i'm feeling a lot more confident, seeing how it is all coming together.

I suppose its not a bad first attempt but i think i need to sort some of the colours out. Especially the bulb, i don't think it stands out enough against the background.

colour? background? arghhh

I have been trying to think what i can use for my background/ the scenery really of my animation. i found a blue bed sheet and tried to layer it up, a bit scrunched like a sky, (the scrunched up bits could add a bit of depth to the background.
Heres a short animation i tried with the background and just a painted sheet of paper as the grass.

I dont really think this worked well because the bumps in the background create wierd shadows for the character, also there is more movement not making the animation look as smooth because it isnt a flat surface.

LEGS.

As you can see form my post below i havent included legs on the new version of lenny, this is because i thought it would be difficult trying to keep track of the legs moving while im trying to adjust other elements aswell.

I tried to observe people around me and imitate their movements on this model so i could see what i would need to do on my animation.

Below is a short experiment i tried with a model moving legs.

This was only made on imovie and it is only about 10 frames, but you get the idea. 

I just couldn't get my head around what the movements needed to look realistic.