I thought I'd post this; just to show the spacing of the animation, plus with the umbrellas coloured and layered up it makes quite an interesting image.

Just an update to show how the colouring is going... half way there and so far so good. Taking a lot longer than I thought because I'm having to neaten up to block colour and add a black and light grey outline over the top of each umbrella, so I'm technically drawing each three times. Whether I'm making life difficult for myself I dont know but I think it will look very nice when it's finished.

Just came across this in one of my folders, thought it would be good to see the timing and spacing of this umbrella shot.

This needs to be changed a lot I think. This is just a rough version of Charlie's struggle still. I wanted to get an idea of how the head will move, when I acted it out I noticed that when pulling back it's as if the chin leads on the 'pull down' for a short while and then gets taken over by the top of the head.

The timing and spacing needs to be adjusted, because at the minute it's definately too even.

Here I have just been playing around with the perspective and this very crude animation shows how it will hopefully look. The head I wasn't too concerned about for the time being, the facial expressions will help to bring it to life, but I'm not that far into it yet.

Again, this started out as a template for animating this shot with the 3D umbrella in Maya, but like the previous one Paul and Neil suggested we keep this, neaten it up and use it as a 2D piece. So... on with the colouring!!

This short sequence definately took longer than anticipated. The idea was to quickly sketch up each frame of the shot, ready for each image to be imported to a plane in Maya, so that the real 3D umbrella animation can be copied over the top of it, it would also help to show the camera angle set up. Originally it was going to take just an hour or so, but I kept going back and adjusting it and eventually it turned out like a proper animation.

When I showed Neil and Paul recently they suggested to get rid of the idea of the 3D umbrella completely and use this 2D version. I was happy with this idea because I think it flows nicely and works well, and it would be doubling our time if we go over anything that's already almost finished. Plus, we don't have a working and ready model of the umbrella to use as of yet.

The only thing is, I'm not sure how it will effect the film. Because the umbrella was going to be used to tie in both the 2D and 3D elements. I'm concerned that now making the umbrella 2D it will make the end 'Imp' shot look totally out of place. But we will have to see...

A quick post to show the almost completed birds-eye layout, the bottom image was drawn 2048px by 1152px because I wasn't sure if the scene would start as a close up and then zoom out to follow the umbrella, but soon after the group decided that with the moving umbrella and rain and wind all going on it would be a lot for the audience to take in, therefore maybe overlooking the background.

So that meant drawing it on a smaller scale, this time using the normal 1024px by 576px. I very much like the skewed shot, even if it is a birds-eye view, you can still see the crookedness of the streets and the buildings.