Work in progress animation

Flare and i have been busy bees over the weekend cracking on with our movie, at the moment we are working between Shots 3 and 4 which are each about 12 to 13 seconds long. The decision to work between 2 shots keying in rough and then alternating between shots while the other person comes in and black solid lines over the red rough seems to be working both quick and effectively, example below. when the keys have been inserted in black we are able to go through and in-between quite quickly, this is still quite time consuming as most of the actions we have so far are slow moments the in betweens really cant be too wobbly or inaccurate or it would stick out like a saw thumb. whilst working with these shots we have found that we are able to derive quite a lot of emotion and acting from very rough key frames, and are able to impart enough emotion to tell what is happening without needing a face or any final line what so ever, we are basically attempting to show whats happening blind and doing so this allows us to work purely with body language without leaning heavily on facial reactions. Also over the course of the last few weeks we have become aware that our deadline is creeping up at an alarming rate with this in mind we have cut out a few pieces of our main characters equipment and have taken more of a simple approach to her appearance. See image below.

Compared to the original design her equipment has been exponentially downsized her belt, braces, extra bits and pieces have been removed to speed up the animating process. But whats great is that if we have extra time during post production there is nothing stopping up from creating a layer above our line and colour and adding the other equipment in. Speaking of colour moving on to my last point of the post, the colouring stage is being tackled along with the animating mainly so when a shot it lined and coloured thats one more shot finished we dont really need to keep coming back to add colour etc. and really the process takes no longer than 2 hours to fully colour a 12 second shot which is great. mainly due to the wonderful colouring tools that TVP has to offer its users. When the colour is added we have many other tricks up our sleeves the help composit our character and background as on there own they seems very separate, but with a little love and dedication we are able to really pull them together and add a nice atmosphere to a scene. On the right is a screen shot of what a coloured still looks like at the moment there is as i said before much left to be desired but once the finishing touches are added it should be fine. Finally Flare and myself have really been pushing each other to get this movie to be the very best we movie we can create, we are sparing no expense ( which at the moment seems to be sleeping around 2 hours a night if we are lucky and pulling extended work periods) not that i am complaining we love animation and everything it en tales. We just hope that when its finished everyone is able to enjoy it as much as we are working on it.