Scene 19 [flight cycle] V1 — V5

Scene 19 [flight cycle]

Version 1

The first flight cycle test, with all its individual components, still quite "stiff" looking despite all attempts to loosen it up. Unfortunately all the individual wing layers caused the animation to look REALLY choppy (even with copious amounts of blurring) so for this version I decided just to use the one wing layer and rotate it on the 3D axis to get the flap. The first attempt was pretty unsuccessful — it's got this weird rotation going on that looks as if she's pushing backwards! 

Version 2

The second version I re-did the flapping a bit, so that it travels more in a straight line with none of the weird outward rotation. It looks distinctly more like a flap now, but the timing's all screwy and the motion is quite choppy — the wing comes to a very sudden stop at the top and bottom of the movement, and overall it just looks really stiff.

Initially I thought I would just be able to alter the speed and timings of each keyframe using After Effects' curve/graph editor and use that to get a bit of overshoot going on (have the wings travel "too far" before settling back into the intended position) but I encountered a pretty huge problem:

The rotation of the wings is handled by the "orientation" parameter rather than individual X, Y and Z rotation keyframes. I did try using individual values but it just doesn't handle the interpolation as well as the orientation does. The problem is that, because the X, Y and Z values are handled by one parameter, they're also locked together on the speed and value graphs:

Basically, what this means is that I couldn't alter the curves of each rotation value individually. Altering the X rotation keyframe, for example, would also change the Y and Z keyframes, leading to all sorts of problems with things getting rotated out of place. You also can't change the slope of the curves, either — notice how there are no bezier handles on any of the graphs shown above. This is a massive issue — I was able to alter the timings to a limited extent using the speed graph but would not have been able to add any of the overshoot that I wanted.

At this point I started toying with the idea of trying to get the flexibility I wanted another way...

Version 3


I'd previously considered using the puppet pin tool alone to animate the wing, which would have given us some great flexibility and bendiness, but it's terribly imprecise and difficult to control animation as much as I would like. 


The wing is its own pre-composition, meaning it's effectively one flat layer with keyframes applied to the orientation values to give the basic flap motion. I decided to see if I could somehow combine the use of the puppet pin with the basic animation I already had...

To my great surprise, it actually looks as if it will work!

Because the bulk of the animation is being driven by keyframes, all the puppet pin is doing is bending and warping the wing as it moves. It doesn't really interfere at all and you still get a great degree of control over the animation whilst allowing a great degree of flexibility in the joints.

Still a great deal of problems with it at this point — the wing, as it comes down, looks to me as if it's going forward too much. I feel that the base of the wing should come more directly downwards and the tip needs to drag behind a little. Same with the upstroke — the middle section of wing should move first, the tip dragging. 

Still, I think it might work, as long as I keep playing around with it.

Version 4 is REALLY similar to V3 so I won't bother with it... ;)

Version 5

It probably looks worse by itself, but once we get the head and body movement going I think it could work quite nicely!

Timing's getting there I think, still not totally happy with the upstroke. I think it the upmost position is perhaps rotated a little too far back — needs to be more vertical maybe?

Crow flight cycle reference and planning

Following on from Jazzy's bold attempts to stalk crows with a camera and capture them landing, I've been looking at how we might be able to animate the scene where the crow swoops in and lands on the scarecrow's arm as painlessly as possible.

By an astonishing coincidence I found this rather interesting video on Youtube:

I find the whole situation hilariously ironic - it's almost exactly the sort of movement we want and it's done in After Effects with an almost puppety looking bird. Of course, owing to the simplicity of the shape the animator was able to get a good deal more flexibility in his bird - note the flexing and arching of the back - it would be significantly more difficult to achieve with our puppet. I would imagine that he used a vector shape or mask of some sort within After Effects and was able to bend and flex the shapes at will. It's an interesting technique and certainly not one I would have considered. I could be totally wrong, of course - he may have done something totally different. I may actually ask him how he did it, mostly out of curiousity, but it may also be beneficial to us and give us some kind of insight as to how we can better approach this scene.

Regardless, it's a useful video to clearly examine the motion of the bird's landing.

From some quick doodles scribbled in Liz's lecture today (don't worry, I was paying attention!) I started looking at how the body would rotate as the crow comes into land, wondering if we might be able to simply use the same body and rotate it, or whether it would be necessary to draw new ones. Happily it seems we'll be able to re-use it. She'd lift her feet and spread her wings wide as she comes in, flapping to keep balance. We could probably use the same wings as well - they wouldn't necessarily change shape or perspective, simply rotate them along with the body.

I think we'd probably need about three "frames" for the wings - an 'up' pose, a 'down' pose and a 'mid' pose. As with the previous bird tests I did, we could probably rotate the wings down on the Z axis and then switch them to the 'mid' position once they get far enough. Hold that for a few frames, then they come down. They'd be blurred, too, I imagine - so that should cover up any choppy 'cuts' between each position!

If the wings are divided up into two or three sections, say, we could even try to get a bit of overlap by delaying the ends of the wings as she flaps up and down.

Planning the flock of crows — perspective

I've started thinking about the composition of the opening shot and how the hell we're going to actually pull it off. The birds are going to be flying from right to left, towards/over the camera from a point on the horizon. The perspective is going to be a bit tricky; realistically the birds would change perspective as they drew nearer the camera but I think, for simplicity's sake, we'll simply stick with one angle and scale it up as they draw closer. They're moving fairly quickly, so hopefully it won't look weird.

I basically just took the backdrop from Jazzy's animatic and scribbled all over it to try and work out an angle for the birds that would look relatively correct no matter the distance. The angle shown above is probably the best option — it still looks reasonably plausible, even with the birds far into the distance. 

The only trouble is going to be getting them to actually fly. Flight cycles are notoriously tricky at any rate, but from such a weird angle it's probably going to be sheer horror. I've found a lot of great references of little birdies flying from all sorts of angles, so hopefully we should be able to use these and come up with something that looks pretty decent!

Again, for simplicity's sake, I think that keeping the birds completely silhouetted would be quite effective. This means we don't need to be too meticulous over the detail of the posing and wings — using a mass of solid shapes that merely suggest the idea of the pose. Plus, I think it would look quite nice against the sky...!

Low angle shots of birds in flight are surprisingly difficult to find, but a happy accident led me to stumble across this video:

It's pretty low quality but the angle is pretty much what we're going for! It's also far too quick, but fortunately I was able to download it and scrub through frame-by-frame. This allowed me to track the positions of a couple of the birds and get an idea for how we might go about the poses:

Again, horrible quality, but it serves to provide a guide as to what our poses might look like. I started thinking at this stage that the easiest option might be to create one basic body shape for each crow, and have the wings as separate layers. That way we'd be free to rotate or scale them between each keyframe — sort of like inbetweening?

Using the shadows as a reference I scribbled out some quick silhouettes to get a feel for the poses. It's almost completely eyeballed, so the proportions are totally off and I didn't particularly expect it to animate perfectly, but it should serve to give us an idea of whether it might work or not...

I drew out a rough sketch of the puppet's body shape using the first one as a reference. I tried to bear in mind the loose anatomy of the bird and made sure to give myself extra 'neck' with a rounded edge, so that we would be able to move and rotate the head!

To neaten things up I traced the outline using the pen tool and then filled the path with solid black, giving a clean edge. How lovely!

The puppet's body would remain the same — we can just pin the wings to him and rotate as needed. The head and body are separate layers and can be puppeted as well, so we could get a nice tilt of the head to counter the movement of the wings and add a little more life to the cycle.

I then just repeated the process, tracing over my wing sketches with the pen tool and filling with black on separate layers.

I definitely think we'd need more frames to ease in and out of the up and down positions, but it kind of gives you an idea as to what we'd be needing. I also just realised they're not arranged in sequence... whoops.

I very quickly slapped them together to see what they'd look like in motion:

It's not quite there yet but I think it's along the right lines. Biggest issues, I think, is the downbeat. It lacks any sort of power and just doesn't read very well at all. Needs to be far slower and hold on the down position a little longer as the rest of the wing starts to pull back up — there's no real continuity between that pose and the one before it. It just kind of jumps into this huge black mass and doesn't really 'read' at all. I think I focused a little too much on the reference and didn't really consider the motion or timing or the mechanics of the movement too much. I think if I can fix up the downbeat and sort the timing out it should look alright. It's getting there at least.

I'd also like to look at animating the body so that it bounces up and down, countering the motion of the wings. That will certainly help. Also bearing in mind that, on-screen, it will be much smaller — as was the case with my last After Effects test it should look nicer once it's actually put together and completed. Not that it's an excuse not to polish it of course!

I'm really sorry. I'm very tired, I can't really articulate myself too well at the moment. Damn birds.


I did go back and try to apply what I'd learned from the guide on Youtube about the beating of the wings, but the result wasn't too good:

I suppose it's smooth enough, but the angle isn't quite right. I was definitely closer the first time — this just doesn't make much sense given the perspective of the body. It's animated as if it's a side-on view. Again, same problems with the extremities; I need to drag the limb from the elbow and hold the positions longer and allow the rest of the wing to catch up before it changes direction.

I think if I can combine the flexibility from this version with the angle/wing shapes of the first version, I might be on to something.

Fortunately I've found a selection of far better quality references that more clearly illustrate the movement of the wings from a low angle:

Hopefully, using these, I'll be able to get a much nicer looking test done this week :]

Initial flight cycle tests/research

Trying to figure out exactly how we can pull off the flock of crows in the first scene, I've been spending some more time looking at the flight cycles of birds and how that might fit into the perspective that we're aiming for. I've located some amazingly helpful resources and tons of reference videos that should hopefully serve to help us to figure out the motion of the crows.

There's this fantastic guide to bird flight written by Brendan Body that goes really in-depth into the mechanics of it and how that applies to animation. He was also kind enough to include masses of videos of birds in flight from all sorts of angles and speeds so that you can really analyse and see the movement and timing of every limb.

I thought it would probably be a better idea to get the hang of a general flight cycle from just one angle — say the front or the side — and fully understand that before even attempting to start injecting perspective into it, so I started looking at some general reference images combined with some of the videos from the above link and just sketching out a few of the poses, trying to figure out how the wing would look at each stage of movement.

I did some extremely crude and scribbles of what appeared to be the main positions of the cycle — keyframes, to some extent, I guess — the 'up' position, the mid position, and the furthest down position. I started thinking about the timings at this stage — the downstroke is slower than the upstroke due to wind/air resistance, depending on the size of the bird in question — so I tried to roughly plot out how many frames it might take each way. Crows are fairly small so probably around 6 - 7 frames to go all the way down and 4 - 5 to come back up? Tried to also think a bit about 'breaking' the limbs a bit to give them some flexibility.

On account of the fact that it was such a quick, rubbish drawing, I'm not surprised it didn't animate properly. I'm not going to try and make excuses for it, the limbs are just too stiff and the spacing is too uniform so it's just a straight up-down movement. It would certainly be fixable; slowing in/out of the upmost and downmost positions would certainly help, but it seems I was in a hideously impatient mood today and just wanted things to magically be brilliant and perfect first time. Blagh.

I had a little look at a very nice little guide on Youtube to see if I could better understand where I might be going wrong in terms of the spacing:

(The body's up/down movement is atrocious — I apologise, but I animated it in Photoshop (which has no onion skinning), so I just opted to make it bob around in a uniform manner and it looks really stupid. Should have left it.)

I referenced completely shamelessly copied the example front cycle from the video — sketching out the shapes simplified like this, I feel, did help me to better understand the underlying movement of the wing beneath the muscle and feathers. It made me realise that, previously, I'd neglected to consider the wing's individual joints and how flexible it actually is. Part of the reason it looked so stiff before, I think, is because it was a simple mass of straight lines and balls. Nothing even remotely organic about it. Wings are very flexible, and even at this rough stage I should be thinking about bending and flexing them to help loosen things up.

As nice as the referenced cycle is, it seems as if the wing stops at the top very suddenly — as if it hits an invisible ceiling. Might be nice to pad that out a bit — as well as delaying the wing at the peak of the up/down strokes.

The two videos above — both taken from Brendan Body's tutorial — are fantastic examples of the joint rotation in a bird's flight. You can clearly see how the bird tucks the tips of its wings back on the upstroke to decrease wind resistance (hence why it's faster!) It really helps to understand how, exactly, a bird gets its wing from A to B — not at all a simple up-down movement like you would expect.

The second video also highlights the delay in the bird's joints — to compare the wing to an arm, the forearm and hand continue to travel forward as the shoulder moves up. Much like the human arm in a walk cycle, in fact!

I think I'm slowly beginning to understand how this kind of thing works, but I still need a lot more practice. Hopefully I can tackle a few more basic flight cycles and really familiarise myself with the motion. Continuing to think of the wing as an arm and comparing the delay/breaking of joints with that seen in a walk cycle will probably help immensely and make the whole process seem just a little bit less alien.

To conclude: birds are weird.