Addition to animation.

So I have worked on a lot of the animation up to date however, I have yet still to plan out my magic scene, that scene that will explain what happens when you are looking down from that bubble. I've come up with the idea of bringing the features into shot with an explosion to make it seem quite surreal and unexpected. At first I was going to throw in multiple explosions and puffing twirling wands then I was going to edit the shot in After Effects and add floating orbs. The orbs didn't seem to work out however as they seemed a bit too unbalanced with the 2D animation and the twirling wands just seemed a bit too bland. Instead, I will be animating a bear coming to life and using a wand as a Ninja stick and a book flying around the screen. It doesn't sound like much now but it will look interesting when the scene is animated.

Backgrounds are complete.

All backgrounds are now complete. I have added the magician Background. Throughout the animation, I've made a point with the 'still shots' that are included, such as Background 4, 6, 7, 8 and 9. With each 'still', the characters are more defined and detailed.

Background 4.

Background 9.

Background 8.

Background 6 - without characters.

Background 6 - with characters.

Background 7 - Edit 1.

Background 7 - Edit 2.

More completed backgrounds.

As the weeks are growing closer to the deadline, I realised that although I'm up to date with the progression on the animation side of things, there were still quite a few background environments I had yet  to complete. So as you can see, I've spent the last few days getting myself back up to date with the backgrounds so that I can add them to my completed scenes.

Background 5.

Background 3.

Background 4.

Background 4 has been re-done. I have since re-designed my character so that the colours that he is wearing blends better. The colours used before were red for the top and dark brown for the bottom, however as I've already talked about, my tutor advised me to change the colours as they were a bit too harsh against the background, which meant my character was essentially lost.

Scene progression.

Over the last few weeks I have been working on the different scenes, completing backgrounds and colouring in completed shots, it has been stressful but the way I see it, is that it is slowly but surely getting there (this is where I wish I hadn't been so adventurous and stubborn in wanting to do everything on my own and just employed a second year to help colour my scenes!)

Here is Shot 16 in stages of development.

As you can see here, the boy is happily dancing with the bubbles as they float around him. I used After Effects to create this realistic bubble effect so I could separate the idea of reality and surrealism. In the finished edit, the main bubble can be seen floating towards the boy, I've deliberately made it so prominent to emphasise that it is an important part to the scene.