The Bond of Four - Some Animation Progress 3

   With the deadline drawing ever nearer, I have mainly been spending my days indoors trying to get all the simpler scenes done before friday. While the fight scenes look incredibly rough (With none of the characters being the least bit recognisable), I believe that the timing has been mainly confirmed for those scenes, and to me, that is what matters the most when it comes getting the sound design done for it.

  

   The simpler scenes on the other hand were simply left as still images in my animatic, so it was only right to not only animate them simply because they would be easier, but to also get a more accurate timing on each of them. Simpler scenes also did allow for slightly more complex shading, seeing as there were only a few frames that I needed to colour in (With thanks to After Effects and even the positioning tool in Photoshop). Though I would have to use a simpler colour style and/or scheme for scenes with more movements, and also take into account what would best suit the atmosphere and mood of that scene. 

   One such example would be the fight scenes, seeing as it takes place at night, I used that to my advantage and decided to go for a more monochromatic colouring scheme when colouring the characters, so more cool shades of blue and grey would be used instead of their actual colour schemes. Even what is apparently a grey eye looks blue in this sort of setting as shown below of the animated eye.

A simpler scene such as this allows for more complex shading and lighting.

   A faster way of blending the colour scheme of the characters with the setting they are in is to use a colour or texture overlay (Especially when there isn't any time to figure out alternative colour schemes for your characters when they are placed in scene with noticeably darker or brighter lighting, Steven Universe does this for example). I actually showed both versions to my friends one without the texture overlay on the characters and one with (Shown above), and it goes without saying that they all preferred the one with the overlay.

   I won't be able to finish this entire scene, but I attempted to at least sketch out all the animations for it instead of leaving the posted doodles in. In fact, I am going to try my best replacing all of those before submitting it in for this deadline, even if I can't finish the entire thing, it's still a lot better than leaving what has already been seen in the original animatic.