Color tests
I brought my drawing from last week into Photoshop and played around a bunch with Hue/Saturation layers and Gradient Maps. I tried to go for analogous color schemes centered on green. The first 5 veer towards warm green and the last 4 towards cool green.

Honestly I think this background simply doesn't have enough detail. No matter what I do to the colors I just don't like it. It doesn't look how it looks in my head. Also, it's like, even though all my references and the style I want to do DON'T color things in their real life colors, I like can't stop myself from doing that. I think I really need to step away from the computer and redraw this background using the stuff in my pencil case, where I don't have access to literally every color that the human eye can register.

Character design
I've been drawing Lorraine over and over again in my sketchbook this week. I can draw her pretty good from the front but any other angle kind of sucks. I think I might do like a Fairly OddParents thing where the character has a front and a side angle and they just flip from one to the other. But now that I'm thinking about it again I don't like the idea.

Saehee and I decided to do our editing exchange together. We booked the Cintiq lab at the CDA and worked for a couple hours.

We edited Saehee's animatic first. I made a lot of timing changes, mostly extending frames for much longer. I also added frames for a title and for credits.
Their animatic starts with a few frames of text that explains the myth they're exploring. I ran the text through a calculator that tells you how long to hold text on screen for legibility and we found that this exposition, when paced slowly enough to actually read, lasts 30 seconds.
Afterwards, we re-timed and reordered each sequence. A lot of frames needed to be held for much longer, taking into account the amount of time needed to animate the movements. Before this, Saehee was worried that they had a lot of gaps in their animatic, but in the end they actually had 2 minutes and 30 seconds of content and need to cut down.

We started editing my animatic next. I had a clear idea of the edits to make (see last week's list), so we just had that to follow. Unfortunately, TV Paint wasn't opening in the Cintiq lab so we had to use Saehee's laptop instead and then it crashed without saving. So.

I did my own timing edits later but we talked about my project and Saehee gave me a really good idea: for the scene where Lorraine wakes up in her room full of ladybugs, I could recreate the rose petal scene in American Beauty.

I finally figured out the formula to create a custom brush in TV Paint that looks like the MS Paint pencil. What was missing before was 30% step. I chose this line thickness for now, but I'm still unsure about it. I might decide to use a smaller line for items in the background, or keep the same line thickness throughout. I'm leaning more towards keeping the same line thickness throughout.
Using this new brush, I redrew each image from my storyboard and added more frames in between to specify the timing of the movements better.

This time I drew Lorraine as she appears in my character design instead of as a stick figure, and honestly, it's just not as funny. The emotions are a lot less raw than when there were no details in the face. I will have to get used to drawing Lorraine in a bunch of poses and emotions.

Feedback from class and from Jean

• first shot: add a second of both girls sitting together before cut
• first ladybug: add a pause between ladybug flying out and Lorraine's reaction, give her time to process
• when Lorraine is looking in the mirror and leaning in, add 12-24 frames before she opens her mouth. Maybe have her open her mouth, see a bug/bugs, close mouth, pause, open again (show her thinking)
• Lorraine's bedroom: make the bed smaller in frame
• scene of Lorraine sleeping: everyone in the class said to make the room MORE red. Like someone said to make the screen entirely red and then have Lorraine's eyes forcibly open like in cartoons when a character is in the dark and only their eyes appear.
• hold the shot of the front of Lorraine's house a bit longer, maybe shorten the frame right before?
• shorten the run across the street, only needs to be like 2 seconds
• when Lorraine smiles, hold that image 1-2 seconds longer
• hold black screen 1-2 seconds longer too, need to show passage of time more clearly...
• last scene: while Lorraine is dancing, cut back and forth between shots of garden pests being eaten. also, show the plants growing up from the dirt.
• exaggerate the plants in front of Lorraine's house (windowsill + yard), both in the before and after. nobody caught that the plants on her windowsill were dead before and blooming after. when they are dead, maybe have flies or stink lines or something in the "before" and then a heavenly glow in the "after". color will help with this.
• when the ladybug eats the aphid, the flower they are on can grow immediately to show the beneficence of the ladybug

I also want to try cutting out Lorraine's friend at the beginning! It might save me a few seconds and make exposition simpler to just introduce Lorraine alone.

Style tests

I made some slight edits in like, the horizon line and the placement of the trees and whatever. I don't love this drawing but again it's a helpful start.

The next steps for this specific background are:
1. thumbnailing different layouts
2. refined color tests
3. redrawing, trying out different line thicknesses