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?

Chase scene ground tile test

After much arsing around this morning I've managed to start getting something prepared for the chase scene! I'm trying to figure out the best way to get the perspective of the shot right without resorting to distorting the images. This is all I've got so far:



The tile was cycled using Motion Tile, as before, and I think the perspective's looking alright so far — it's getting the bushes on there that's the trouble (though we always knew that would be the case.)

I'm not too pleased with it though — if you watch closely you can see that the animation doesn't loop seamlessly and many of the stones get cut off. The original tile was rotated on the 3D axis, leading to distortion in perspective. The edges of the image no longer line up neatly, which is essential for the Motion Tile effect to work seamlessly.

The ground itself is 3 seperate layers. Once I'd gotten the perspective of the first tile right, I pushed it into the distance to mark the horizon line. I then just duplicated it and pulled it forward until the edges lined up, repeating until the screen was filled.

The "top" view shows the layer stack (the camera is positioned at the bottom of the image, so the higher something is, the further away it will appear)

It's a start, at least, but optimally I'd like to try and get it to scroll absolutely seamlessly. After Effects' Orbit and Pan Camera tools may allow me to accomplish the same sense of perspective without actually distorting the image, meaning that the layers should still line up correctly. I'll have to have a play around with it.

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.

Eternally scrolling bushes, V2

To finish up the animatic (for now, at least!) I had a shot at replacing those circles with actual bushes to see how the effect would look and, most importantly, whether it would still work...

I apologise in advance for the informal tone of this post. I do try to maintain some level of relative professionalism, but when trying to explain something relatively tricky I find that if I don't laugh (or make crap jokes), I'll cry...

I started, most logically, by drawing a bush. It is, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the foliage equivalent of the Mona Lisa — try not to weep at my artistic ability.

I actually only drew half a bush and then mirrored it — a precaution to ensure that it did definitely loop seamlessly. I'm sure it would work with an asymmetrical bush, but I didn't feel much like running that risk!

With the bush happily drawn and imported into After Effects (as a layered composition, natch), the next thing was to apply the Motion Tile effect (found under Effect > Stylize > Motion Tile)

The Tile Center parameter is the one of interest — as said before, this will give us the seamless "conveyor belt" effect. I wish I'd thought of describing it as a conveyor belt when I was first trying to find out how to do this. Would've saved a lot of time.

Slap a keyframe on there, then we need to ensure we get a seamless loop. To do that we need to make sure that the position of the bush is exactly the same at the first and last keyframes — the easiest way to do that is numerically. Right clicking on the parameter gives you the "Edit Value" dialogue box, which gives you a greater degree of control over the movement of the tile.

In this instance I chose to use "percentage of source" as the unit of measurement. I guess you could do it with pixels but I can't handle that many numbers. The objective here is to have it move in equal increments and complete one (or two or however many you want) cycles and end up exactly where it started. Theoretically, we could just insert a very high number and that would pretty much play as long as we need it to, but for simplicity I wanted it to scroll just once. I could then loop the animation using just an expression.

Anyway, in order for it to end up exactly where it started, we need to set the ending value in multiples of whatever our beginning keyframe is. Confused? Me too, but trust me, it works! So in this instance, we're starting at 50%, so our last value needs to be a multiple of 50.

150% in this case, would be one complete cycle and a half. The bush in the first frame is halfway off the screen, so ending on another half value will lead into the next bush (which will also be halfway off-screen) and continue the cycle. The next screenshot illustrates that better:

So you can see that by duplicating this bush layer many times and aligning them next to each other, we'll get a side-scrolling loop of as many bushes as we possibly need. Hooray!

The bushes are inside their own composition, so I just dropped those onto the main composition (containing the rest of the scene) and activated the 3D layer switch.

I then just tweaked the Y and Z rotation/orientations to try and roughly line up the bushes with the edge of the path. It's at this point that the first problem becomes apparent — being 2D objects rotated on a 3D axis, they're very, very flat. Not a good look. I'm not sure how we can get around this — the only thing that springs to mind is to simply draw the bushes at the correct angle/perspective to the path, but I'm not sure how that would affect the looping, or indeed whether it would still work at all. Definitely something to experiment with.

I also used the Corner Pin effect (Effect > Distort > Corner Pin) which works something like Photoshop's perspective transform to squash the bushes down as they got further into the distance, but that in itself is a problem — the more you transform it, the more distorted the bushes become, leading to pretty ugly/low quality images. Not cool.

To get the bushes on the other side I just duplicated this composition and flipped it around, adjusting the rotation to match the other side of the path.

I used the same effect to animate the path, using this seamless tile texture I stole off the internet:

I quickly desaturated it and scaled it horizontally to fit the width of the path and used the same combination of motion tile (moving it on the Y axis instead of the X) and corner pin to get the perspective right. It's quick and lazy but it sort of works and it serves to give us an indication of what we need to do. It's now just trying to replicate this effect in a style that matches the rest of the backdrops...

Jae did suggest using textures over Jazzy's flat colour backgrounds, so using a loopable ground texture might slot nicely into that. Again, it'll be something we need to experiment with before reaching a final decision.

The very last thing I did was try to get the bushes/ground to stop when the crow does — After Effects has a feature called "Time Remapping" which, to steal Adobe's description, distorts time for a range of frames within a layer. This basically means that you set a couple of keyframes to mark the section you want to mess with. It's possible to speed up, slow down or even reverse entire sections (endless possibilities for lip sync!) but it's confusing and irrelevant (for now) — the most straightforward use is to add "holds" or pauses. Basically, to freeze-frame.

Simply right click on the layer you want to alter, go to Time and then Enable Time Remapping.

I marked the point I wanted the ground/bushes to stop moving — in this case, just as the hang glider is obscuring the screen — and set down a keyframe. We want this position to be held for the entirety of the animation, so copy the keyframe and paste it right at the end of the sequence. Because the values are the same, it'll hold there. Forever.

I didn't want it to judder to a halt too suddenly, so for the first "hold" keyframe I applied an "Easy Ease" effect just to soften it slightly. I could then just copy and paste these keyframes onto the bush layers (after enabling time remapping).

The finished scene:

Again, multiple issues — squashed bushes and random cutoffs that even the crow couldn't disguise! For all intents and purposes, though, it sort-of works. Hopefully these problems will be something we're able to work around... it will, with any luck, be a simple case of altering the artwork for best effect.

Eternally scrolling bushes, V1

One of the things that had vexed and puzzled us most in creating the animatic was how to achieve the effect of the scrolling background in the scene where the crow is fleeing from the hang glider. We knew from the start that we wanted her to run on the spot as the scarecrow approached from behind, with the bushes and ground scrolling past into the distance to give the effect of movement.

Demonstrating the desired composition of the shot.

We'd come up with a few solutions as to how this could be achieved but they mostly involved laboriously animating each bush, pushing it further and further into the distance. This was both time consuming and impractical; if we wanted to alter the timing or length of the shot at all we would have to re-tweak the keyframes manually in order to compensate. We'd also considered simply drawing a line of bushes far longer than we needed and simply scrolled that into the distance, but this, again, was problematic; we didn't know exactly how long the shot would be and needed flexibility to make adjustments as necessary. The ideal solution would be to somehow have an endless loop of scrolling bushes that would dynamically adjust its length in accordance with the length of the clip. A simple enough idea, but it was the technical execution that proved to be a stumbling block.

A bit of poking around online (and the guidance of a friendly message board visitor) revealed a rather nice "Motion Tile" effect within After Effects. The Motion Tile basically allows you to take any layer, image or object and replicate (or "tile") it across the entire composition. Altering the "Tile Center" property moves the tile within the constraints of its bounding box without needing to move the layer itself. By keyframing this parameter, you can create a sort of conveyor belt effect with almost any image.

I created a simple test using a basic circle to represent the bushes to see whether or not we would be able to achieve the desired effect in this way.

I actually animated the bushes next to each other, scrolling in a straight line. The illusion of perspective was created by placing the animated bushes within a new composition and making it a 3D layer. I was then able to adjust the Y and Z rotations so that the bushes ran alongside the path, appearing to vanish into the distance. Unfortunately there's a sharp cut on the last bush which, fortunately, we were able to disguise by placing the crow over the top — ideally, however, we'll be able to find a way to rectify this more neatly as we're otherwise very restricted as to where we can position the bird.

The animation does loop seamlessly and certainly works for these purposes, aside from a few kinks that need to be worked out. The perspective needs to be tightened up — ideally, we'll find a way to get the desired perspective without distorting the artwork too much. As it is we're needing to seriously re-scale the bushes which will inevitably lead to horrible image quality — though it's less noticeable with such a simple circle.

At least we know now that we can get the kind of effect we need. Certainly it needs refinement, but the basic principle is there! Hopefully we can do something similar with the ground texture, although creating a loopable ground tile could prove to be much trickier. I'm going to investigate potential solutions for the ground tiles and replace the circle with an actual bush to see how it works out.

Sketchbook: 23/01/2012 and a quick animation test-thing

I barely got anything done today. It seems that somewhere between tidying my room, going shopping, arguing with the pharmacy and trying to fix my phone that the day has drifted away. I just wish I didn't feel like such a failure every time this happens. It's just one day and I don't have anything pressingly imminent to have achieved, but I feel like I've wasted my time and that I've let myself down. I that, unless I'm eating or sleeping, I should be working all the time, or else I'm not working hard enough. This makes me feel like crap, which causes me to do even less. It's a vicious hate spiral.

Bleh. Anyway. Things!

Wanting to do some quick experiments/tests/practice animations just to start getting back into the swing of things, so I thought that I might try doing a short sequence of somebody waiting for a bus, or something... for some reason. I filmed myself for reference and to get some basic ideas, kinda came up with a guy leaning on the wall, drumming his fingers and looking around. He straightens up, puts his hands in his pockets and swings from side-to-side a bit, before checking his watch and throwing his arms down in impatience. Looks very nice in my head, but in reality this is all I ended up with:

Again I demonstrate my complete inability to finish anything.

It's barely more than keyframes and some really shoddy inbetweens right now. It's a bit scruffy and terribly lazy, with some obvious problems — not too pleased with the standing up (think he needs to move his weight forward a bit more before straightening) and there's a kink in the swinging where he goes back and then suddenly forward then back again. I think there needs to be more of a pause as he looks at his watch, and I'd like the arms to have a bit more weight as he drops them, maybe sag his shoulders a bit more to emphasize his frustration. I think the looking up/back just before the watch check is a bit fast too, bit lifeless.

I don't know if I'll keep tweaking it. I'm going to maintain that it was just a loose exercise, nothing too serious, just something to freshen up — but I need to start dedicating myself to these little practices. It's a good habit to get into and I need to work on my attention span/focus. I get distracted too easily.