A New Pen, a new hope...

Before the weekend arrived, my brand new Wacom Bamboo pen appeared in my mailbox and thus ended a week of no animation work. 

 

Thanks again to everyone for all the nice comments and concerns about this temporary set back in our production. 

Work was still going on even without the use of this pen. Adrian was hard at work putting buildings together and creating a camera move thru the cityscape. Here's a rough preview...

Citypan01 from Toondini on Vimeo.

And so, I wanted to have the final animation finished by our Halloween party Oct 25th, but that doesn't look good at this time. If I can finish the other scenes before our November 21st deadline I will be amazed. So far, every scene has been hand drawn by me and this is what takes the longest time to do. When we begin on the next episode, I will set up my characters a different way to allow anyone to animate them, while still keeping them on model.

There are a lot of scenes that I have tried to keep simple, but walking is always difficult to do when using a puppet rig. This scene I animated two walks by hand and am starting to regret it. Don't get me wrong, animating a walk can be fun to do, but it does take a lot of time to get it right. I think I have managed to get away with it in this scene, although I cheated a little on the big guy walk. Notice you never see his feet.

Here's the first animatic showing the timing of the scene.

ending001 from Toondini on Vimeo.

And now here is the animation of the bad guys walking and searching the room with their flashlights.

ending002 from Toondini on Vimeo.

I am currently finishing up this scene and will add the flashlight beams in After Effects. I'm also need to add our cat character. Once this is completed, color will be added and the layers will be imported into After Effects along with the background. Hopefully, next week I will be able to post the finished scene.

Lots to do and the November deadline is just around the corner...