Puppet pose planning and reference

Starting to develop more puppets and thinking about how best to articulate each one. It's much trickier than you'd think; despite the crow's relatively simple design there are a lot of body parts to consider. I've been trying to think economically in terms of re-using as many pieces as possible whilst still maintaining lively and expressive poses and overall quality of animation.

I started with a fairly simple pose from a scene that doesn't require a great deal of movement in the crow — right at the end, when she's perched on the scarecrow, holding the bug in her beak. If done correctly, this pose could potentially be re-used for the scene where she actually lunges forward and grabs the bug from his hat as well. 

It looks totally awful at the moment — it's those blinking wings. I have a basic understanding of their overall structure and mechanics, but trying to rotate them and picture the folding from such a weird angle is incredibly difficult. The one at the top would probably work but I just really wasn't happy with it. The angle isn't quite right, really — the scene in question is more of an over-the-shoulder shot, whereas that one's a little more side-on. It could be used for the bug-grabbing scene, however! 

On the top left is the sketch from the 'above' puppet I posted previously. Nothing to say there.

It was pretty hopeless trying to completely imagine how the wings might fold so I compiled a bunch of beautiful reference images pilfered from Flickr! I opted to grab pictures of regular birds as well as crows — partially because there weren't many images of crows from the angle I wanted. The one on the far-right of the middle row is probably the most useful for my purposes, so it's the one I focused on most.

From the references I was able to scribble something that made a bit more sense — it took me a few tries and it's still far from perfect. I was using a poor-quality printout, however, and it was pretty difficult to see too much detail to reference. I started having real trouble with the head at this point — I tried hiding more of the beak behind the head to better suggest the angle but it just looked a bit peculiar. I think I finally sort-of got it though?

I'm not going to worry too much about the detail of the sketch at this point. It's really just to provide a base to work from — it will be much easier to correct all the horrible mistakes digitally.

I also started thinking a bit more about the wings and flight cycle at this point and how we might go about animating that with nothing but puppets as painlessly as possible.

As before, I started digitally sketching the base of the puppet in Photoshop. The reference on-screen was much clearer and easier to see so it was much easier to get the angle of the wings correct.

I also replaced the original head with one of the others that I had drawn, which fit the angle of the body much better. 

Once the sketch was complete I started going over it again with the pen tool, creating blocky shapes on each layer for each relevant body part. In retrospect it probably wasn't necessary as the crow isn't going to really move at all, but I figure it's always a good move to have articulated puppets ready just in case.

I had a bit of an issue with the outlines - the normal method of simply "stroking" each section wasn't really going to work in this instance - the way I'd divided up the limbs looked a bit weird when stroked like that. The shapes were a bit clunky and awkward. I would have had to alter a lot of the outlines by hand to make it work, so I opted to just draw them myself. It allowed me to keep a lot of the original detail - I think (hope?!) it looks a bit better this way:

Thinking a little further about the more complex sections of the animation, I started trying to figure out how we might look at doing the crow's run for the hang glider chase scene. In theory, it shouldn't be causing too much problem, as it's mostly actually already animated within the animatic. The difficulty, for me, is knowing how far to take it and how to make it fit within the puppet design. 

The animatic version is a simple two-frame cycle of the crow's legs simply going up and down. There's a bit of keyframing to move her up and down and side to side as she runs. Something like this could probably work reasonably well within the final animation, however I wasn't sure whether or not I should look to making the cycle a little more polished and actually animate the legs properly. One thing I'd considered doing was to have maybe three frames for the feet - one flat on the ground, the other being lifted up, and the other outstretched in front. I thought we could maybe take a simple leg shape and rotate it in 3D space along the Z axis to appear as if it was rotating upwards, lying flat towards the camera, to give the impression that she was lifting her leg. As the leg rotated the "lifted" foot could be used, switching to the "outstretched" foot when her leg is fully extended.

I'd really need to put an example together - it's a bit tricky to explain...!

I've started loosely sketching out a potential puppet, trying to figure out how to not make it look utterly ridiculous. Front angles are tricky at any rate, let alone for bloody birds... No matter what I do her face always looks stupid

I was referring heavily to the crow Jazzy drew for the animatic - it's pretty perfect, I've just got to try and adapt it into the style of the crow puppet.

I really don't know about the beak or anything about the face. I think the top of the beak... the bridge-y nostril bit possibly needs to be wider? The expression looks off. She doesn't look particularly scared. It just doesn't have the charm or humour or simplicity of the original, I just don't know how to make it work. I'm not sure if my leg idea will work either - still, best to try eh?

The last thing I started looking at were wings! Specifically, their application to the scene where the crow leaps into the air and runs from the hang glider. The animatic shows her leaping in shock, looking behind her before turning and bolting. This sounds like it would require a great deal of additional puppets, but I've been thinking about it a bit and I reckon it might be possible to get away with just one, using a couple of additional heads and wings for the jump. The body and legs could be recycled from the side-on run (which is going to be very similar to the walking puppet). We could probably just lift her legs and feet (as shown in the terrible doodles at the top there) and attach a new head and set of wings.

We could potentially animate her wings very similarly to how I did the flying crows - we could use one or two basic wing shapes and simply keyframe them up and down at high speed, then apply a heavy motion blur so all you get is a blurred shape flailing about. Maybe we could even kick her legs and shake her tail a bit!

The question of how to fold her wings back up for when she starts running is a bit trickier. We could probably get away with just adding a blurred mid-pose as she draws them back to her body - the whole movement will be very quick so I think we can get away with being pretty loose with it.

I'll have to do some tests to see whether it will work or not. Hopefully it will!

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 :]

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.