With picture lock due at the end of this week, I've been roughly animating/extensively keyframing across the entire film, and re-timing shots. I put in some of the changes recommended to me last week:

• "zoomed out" the first shot and panned it a bit to show the background a bit better
  
• re-timed the run in and run out of the house; and I especially worked on the shot in which Lorraine's first ladybug flies out her mouth.
• animated the plants growing tall in the last shot
• added a car driving by in the distance when Lorraine is lying in the grass
• keyframed Lorraine's epiphany so that she goes :o

That's it!!! Just working on timing.

This past week, I've been adding more keyframes throughout the film, particularly the first 2 scenes. I'm having difficulty with the acting, and I was trying to avoid using video references. Often, with drawing and with animating, I get lost in my references and my work loses some character, my animation becomes less elastic, and it starts to look rotoscoped, in a bad way.

I presented my progress on Thursday (not realizing that the version I showed in class actually didn't include a lot of the keyframing I did this week, I messed up my files due to a lack of sleep, sorry) and got some more feedback from Jean and the class.

• Shot 2.2: don't have Lorraine looking wistfully out the window, just animate the flowers drooping a bit after she goes inside​, and have some dead flowers fall off
• Film myself acting for Lorraine closeups (face acting)
• Hold shot 2.1 empty before Lorraine runs in, and have her skid the corner
• In the first shot, play up how nice and fancy the place is where she's having tea time with her friend before the bugs come out, like maybe widen the shot and pan a bit to show the beautiful space they're in. this will make it more mortifying when she vomits bugs
• Shot 1.3: let Lorraine still be holding her cup for continuity and so that when she opens her mouth a second time it's to talk/laugh it off/try to sip again.

That's it for current next steps! I'm making so many little changes it's hard to keep track of them. Picture Lock is next week and I'll have to spend lots of time keyframing to make it. The flow is getting easier now and it takes less time and effort to make new drawings every week. When I work out now, I think of my movements in keyframes.

Backgrounds Update
I made some good progress this week. I reworked my colour script to make each scene more cohesive and less reliant on local colour, and from that I was able to create colour keys for several scenes.
Ramona gave me some good feedback that the farm scene was way too bright. I decided to tone it down by painting it over several times in a light grey on Hard Light mode, which lessened the colors while keeping the lineart bright and fun. I like the way it looks!!
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I also started putting in some linework in TvPaint, which means I can start animating certain scenes where the action is behind/around background objects.

Soundtrack Collaboration
​I met with Emmeline today, a composer who's going to create original music for the cartoon. She reached out to me after seeing my animatic on the soundtrack collaboration sheet with a TON of really great ideas for the score, including to represent the ladybugs' flight with a bassoon and to incorporate that instrument into the upbeat melody at the end to show how Lorraine and her bugs are in harmony.
Our meeting was super productive; both of us had prepared cue sheets with our ideas and we discussed them. I really trust her sense of timing and emotional cues, and it's such a relief to know that my film will have good music!!!

Background Update
I finally painted a background that I like!!! The buildings are detailed with washes of color and some bricks and windows. For this shot, the sky is changing from sunset to nighttime to sunrise, with the sun and moon rotating like they're on a spinning wheel. The clouds, stars, and birds will be coming in and out from outside the frame.
The buildings don't change color at all and I think it still works. I know I said I would adding a bunch of lineart to my backgrounds but for this shot, it made the buildings feel smaller than I want them to. I think this will look REALLY good all pixelly!!!! I'm so excited to draw it with my special brush!!!

Sound Exchange
Jesu and I partnered up for this homework assignment, which was to exchange detailed feedback on what we would do with each other's soundtracks. He was super generous with his feedback and I feel so hopeful now that I have clear ideas for what to do next!

Here is the list of advice from Jesu (and I will be implementing all of it):

In the last week of the fall semester, I fully animated the shot of a ladybug flying onto a clover with an aphid crawling over it. I don't love how it looks, and it made me realize that if I try to color in this project in TvPaint using local color for everything, I'm not going to get a sophisticated color palette.

For now, I am using Photoshop to paint some color keys with techniques like underpainting and light washes of color, using square and triangle painting brushes. I plan to use as references for when I render my backgrounds with the pixel brush technique.

I worked on a color script and some background color keys. It helps to see the whole film's palette on one page, but it is still too dependent on local color. Getting away from rendering things the way they "should be" is really hard, but I want this cartoon to look interesting!!!

I particularly like the city shots and Lorraine's bedroom. I think this film really works best when the backgrounds don't draw too much attention (some of my classmates even said they think I should keep it black and white except for the bugs). So at least this color script was helpful to figure out what I DON'T want.

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

This week, aside from the design exchange, I timed out my own project into a first draft animatic. All I really did for this was bring my rough crappy MS Paint storyboard into TV Paint, then isolate each drawing and time them. It didn't take too long, and the final result is a film that's just about 1 minute 40 seconds.

For sound, I made a list of all the SFX I would need to search for on Metadigger:

I decided not to go with basically any ambiance sound, and to use minimal human sound. Metadigger doesn't even have any female vocals of gagging and coughing. The bug sounds are a mix of bee sounds, cartoon fly sounds, and wasp swarms. I used sound clips from the Hanna-Barbera and Warner Bros Cartoon libraries whenever possible.

Character Design sketches
Lorraine, in my mind, should have some bug-esque features. I want my character to be kind of appealing, but I also want her to be funny to look at, and I want to be able to contort her into strange shapes without worrying about keeping her cute. It's a difficult balance for me. I settled on this pink character here. Short hair was definitely the way to go and for now, she is as close to a stick figure as can be.

I never do animated characters with eyelashes, just because I don't want to draw each stinking eyelash 2000 times, but for this project I'm going to try it because they just make her look so creepy and a little dumb. Her big round eyes with 3-4 eyelashes on each side also kinda look like bugs themselves.

I think the pointyness of her hair, her shoes and her dress make it seem like Lorraine is normally a person who values neatness, which makes it especially upsetting for her to suddenly be vomiting bugs all the time.

It's also important to me that her hands and feet be disproportionately long and floppy.

Storyboard sketch
I drew this storyboard on a browser MS Paint program coded by someone (that I'm so grateful for) who wanted the crappy 2007 version of the program to still be available in this day and age. I absolutely love the look of the square brush and the pencil. Its rudimentary look really adds to the comedy and allows your imagination to fill in a lot of detail.

The ending is pretty rushed and I'm worried that it is unclear still, but I'm hoping that the class will provide some feedback on that.