Animation Passes and Paintovers.

Hello,

I've been pretty busy on the short Hunted animation I've been working on in my spare time.

I've got to the point where im looking at what the background environment should look like, below is how it currently looks. It's just a rough mock-up made of a few planes.



For inspiration I've been looking at the backgrounds in the Sorcerers Apprentice with Mickey Mouse.
There is a great animation blog here called Animation Backgrounds with a set of background images from the animation:
www.animationbackgrounds.blogspot.com/search/label/THE%20SORCERER'S%20APPRENTICE

I took the image above and painted over it in Photoshop.
My composition, texture and colour is nowhere near as strong as those images above however I do love to try. Hopefully with a few iterations I can get a bit nearer the quality shown in Disney's backgrounds.
As it is I like the idea of using moody midnight blues to convey the mood. I think the overall composition could do with some work to make it more interesting. I should also look at using colour to help describe the volumes in the scene.
I'm going to look at a few books of old castles to see if I can find items to punctuate the scene with. Maybe those books will point towards the colour scheme I should use too.



Animation Passes

Following on from last weeks post with the first blockout of the overall movement. Here is the next pass which gives some idea of how I want the character to move during the animation:



Here's an update, I had an idea that there should be an antagonist right at the end to end the scene with a question. What happens to the main character when confronted by a chap with a sword.



And here is the latest pass with all the animation blocked out. The next phase is to ask as many people as possible for critical feedback before moving onto polishing the animation. Hopefully there arent too many fundamental errors that require fixing. The further I go into an animation the more time it takes to change it fundamentally.



That's it for now, my next tasks are to set up a basic face rig for the main character and carry on working out what the background should look like.

cheers.