Wip

[Black Spot]

Hi. I’m busy doing an animation for a song my husband co-wrote about London. Needless to say it’s all about London. All my background characters are faceless and running on castors. Only my main characters will be properly animated. I’m using Serif DrawPlus8 that doesn’t have key frames. All frames will be exported individually as tiffs to make up the video. I have two years in my spare time to do four and a half minutes.

This is just a short test to see how many background characters were needed for a close shot.

http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j123/black_spot/Animation-Test/group.gif

First test of my main character. Still needs loads more work.

http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j123/black_spot/Animation-Test/martindance.gif

Very short scene. I need loads more people in the background and they need to move slower. I had all 6000 plus frames lip-synched out, but it still needs tweaking – it’s off at the beginning.

http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j123/black_spot/Animation-Test/th_test3.jpg (http://s79.photobucket.com/albums/j123/black_spot/Animation-Test/?action=view&current=test3.flv)

[Zilant]

Hmmm. It's an interesting direction your taking here.
Are these including the breakdowns, or just the keyframes?
(I mean Keyframe in the traditional sense. Not in terms of the program's abilities)

The source material your animating with is lovely.
Your rendering of the clothes on the background characters being especially nice.
Their designs are wonderfully varied. Different weights, ages, ethnicities, even senses of style.
You went the extra mile on the background character's designs and the work really shows.


My only critique at this point,

I know your taking pains to make things seem artificial as a stylistic choice, seeing as how we're talking about faceless cardboard cutouts on wheels and all. But I think having everything move in a similar way takes you from artificial to mechanical, effectively dehumanizing the crowd.

More specifically: Moving the crowd-on-wheels at a varied paces/speeds, with pack-like behaviors, and individual movements would be mimicking real crowds and is pretending the cutouts are the humans they're trying to depict (artifical), moving everyone at a similar pace/speed, with everyone spaced apart fairly evenly, and using movements that are twin'ing* is unnatural in humans (mechanical). So much so I think your in danger of losing the sense of humanity itself.


*twin'ing: slang for motion that's repeated on two separate things.
Ex: The red jacket and black jacket moving towards the right in the back.
You don't have any occuring in the second crowd scene, but, in the first you have quite a bit that's either exact or much too close for comfort (but that could just be because it's a test, if so, just ignore that part of my comment).

[Black Spot]

You’re right. I need more groups moving like flocks of birds, almost streaming along in lines. Perhaps couples and families to break up the individuals might help.

Thanks, your comment has been very useful.