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.

Synopsis
Lorraine is a regular woman who suddenly, inexplicably, has ladybugs fly out of her mouth each time she opens it. How will she adjust to her new life?

Treatment
This project will be animated in 2D in a limited style. I would like to emphasize the cartoonishness of the world by having characters, props, and backgrounds metamorphose rather than move naturalistically.
My design inspirations are Looney Tunes and UPA productions for background and character design. Each character will be a single color, rendered in several shades, and details added with black linework. The backgrounds will not have black linework, but rather details will be drawn in sparse, colorful linework. The backgrounds will each have an analogous color scheme that will highlight the mood of its scene. Additionally, since the ladybugs are a prominent story element, they will be the only red things.
I want this film to have a digital texture reminiscent of MS Paint. I plan to use hard square digital brushes with no pressure-based changes in opacity, thickness, or jitter. My brushstrokes will have no taper, but instead hard-stop. Shading and gradients will be rendered in pointillism, mimicking the spray-paint tool. If there are large areas in the background without details, I will add a light gradient across the area to ensure that my film has no completely flat areas that would make it look unfinished.

Sound Treatment
The story will be narrated as if someone is reading a storybook, meaning there will be one voice actor reading the narration and acting out the dialogue. I’d like there to be jazzy music that reflects the mood of the events onscreen and is on beat with the action. The ladybugs should have their own unique instrument that acts out all their movements onscreen, ideally a funky little piano or some kind of horn instrument. I don’t envision ambient sound for this film, but spot effects will be present, likely not panned.

Visual References
These first 3 images represent the texture I want to achieve with my shading and linework.

I'm using Pussy / Cipka as a video reference for the cartoonish aspect of her characters' movements.

The following images show the analogous color scheme I want to try and the lineart colors. These backgrounds have a bit of complementary color in them too which I don’t want to include. IMPORTANT: I think the ladybugs should be the only red things in my animation. Super important that they stand out!
The final image is an example of how I plan to use shading/gradients in my backgrounds wherever I feel there are areas too large without any detail.

I'm not much of a storyteller. I like to draw and work out problems in the visuals, but anything to do with story is really beyond me.

The idea for this story about a girl who vomits ladybugs when she opens her mouth actually came to me about a year or two ago. I had a homework assignment to pitch 2-3 short story ideas for an animation project, and I kind of already knew what I wanted to do for that project and I had to make up something else. It was super late and I was exhausted so I doodled these.

I just really made myself laugh with these, especially the tripping over a rock.

These images don't really make up a story though. The concept was super funny to me, but all the ideas I had were for visual gags and there wasn't really anything tying them together. How did this start? Why is this happening? How will it be resolved? Will it even be resolved? I had no idea, and to be honest, I didn't even like the idea of there being a reason, a lesson, or a theme attached to this idea. I just wanted to laugh at this girl throwing up hundreds of ladybugs.

My boyfriend talked it over with me and actually came up with the story. He wrote me a script, which I shortened to fit the 2 minute time constraint of the project. I told him I wanted it to be a fable in the Roald Dahl style. He went in a Dr. Seuss direction with the script, which I don't want to go with, but I love the story structure.