This past week was very productive and I can feel that I am getting into a flow and am putting scenes together more and more quickly.
I took on some easier shots just to get them out of the way and because it feels great to be able to put them together in only roughly two days each, which is very quick compared to the longer scenes.
Here is the updated animatic including the new scenes:
I have finally finished the 'branch riding' scene, and I am really proud with the way it turned out. I think this is one of my favourite shots of the entire film. It was challenging but also a lot of fun to animate the quite complex character movement without any reference and it still working convincingly. Mike has found a way to generate the character matte layer in After Effects and it speeds up the process immensely. I am now using this scene as a blueprint, so that I can just go in and replace footage with newer shots. This speeds up the editing process a lot.
Renata animated the smoke for scene 1 and I'm really grateful for her help! I was able to put together the first scene in no time (I might just have to adjust the camera movement a little). I think I am making very good use of 3d layers in this shot, which is a lot of fun to play with. I was wondering if all the smoke is maybe a bit much and distracting but then remembered that this is exactly the feelings the city scenes are supposed to evoke.
For the close up of the shoes walking through the city, I printed out the keyframes from the animatic, changed them slightly and animated them. This saved me quite some time and I think I will do that for a few other scenes as well. The people passing by in front of the character are just 4-5 images each that I repeated and layered and I think the chaotic visuals convey the busy feeling well. I might need to add some more walk cycles in the back of the character? Sam mentioned that the fact that these passers-by are transparent might make viewers feel like they are somewhat ghostly, which I don't mind because that is kind of the vibe of the city people in this film. That way the focus stays on the main characters shoes as well and highlights the difference in speed better; it became too much when I tried making the passers by more opaque. But Sam made a very good point: I need to keep that consistent throughout the city scenes!
The scene is almost done, it just needs some fine tuning in places and I need to adjust the speed of the ground to her walk to reduce the 'sliding' effect.
Next I want to prepare more backgrounds, so that I can ask Renata and Magnus again to animate a few details for me. One of them is the close up of the city view from the forest (it's almost done) and the other is the leaves, so that the water drops can be animated.