Deeper Focus - Rough Environment Animation

I decided to continue preparations to animate an entire environmental scene using the oil pastels. I used flash to do a first pass on the animation. I split the scene into 2 components that needed to be animated. The first component was the grass for the prairie field. I animated a row of grass that I could then duplicate in Adobe After Effects, and offset the timing to create a rolling effect.

Rough Grass and Sky from Thalia McWatt on Vimeo.

This was a horrible experience. The Adobe Flash program I was working on was glitchy the entire time I worked on this animation. I was working on a cintiq and I found that the pen was not responding well at all. Every time I tried to make a line on my screen a menu would open or a severe lag would diminish my ability to make curved lines. I decided to do my rough animation in Flash in order to decrease production time, but I think ultimately it would have been faster and smoother to simply animate the sequences on paper.



Grass Animation from Youtube

Sky Animation from Youtube



The animation process for the sky was similarly frustrating but I am pleasantly surprised with the quality of the loop I managed to achieve. It moves far too quickly compared to my original vision for the movement in the sky, but I know that with a proper amount of inbetweening I can slow the movement down while simultaneously making it smoother.

The colour scheme is also not what I envision for the final project. The scene will hopefully be dirty pink and orange pastel colors with a slightly surreal sense of movement. I wish to make this look like a landscape in a dream and this was a good first step towards that goal.