Extended Practice: Analysis of Scene 14: Long shot, my first scene with a watercolour background

I wanted to talk about Scene 14: Long shot because it is the very first scene I have animated that includes a watercolour background aesthetic. I knew it was essential to animate a watercolour scene for my submission to actually show that it works with the character animation and I'm glad I animated this scene because it is the first scene in which we meet an older 17 year old Lucy.

I knew the backgrounds had to work with the characters, they had worked throughout with a coloured pencil background and a coloured felt-tip pen background so this was the last hurdle. I think the results are very successful and accomplish exactly what I was setting out for. At this point in the story, Lucy has matured pretty much into adulthood mixed with a teenage rebellion. And I wanted the backgrounds and her in them to reflect this, she is more mature, that is why I used the Maya model of the Nan's house as a guide to trace over to show her maturity as the backgrounds have matured.

In terms of how the actual animation looks, I am reasonably satisfied. This is a more complicated scene because the characters interact with the backgrounds. in this case the Nan opens the front door. The last time I animated a front door opening was for the scene 'Long Shot - Entering home'.

Here, I decided that to keep to visual consistency, for every frame the door moves, I should colour it and draw it by hand. While I feel the results were very strong, it was a hugely time-consuming process for such minor details. This scene ended up taking around a week to animate in full and for such a small scene, deadline or not, that is too time inefficient.

This time I decided to animate the door straight onto Animate CC. There was no way I was going to hand paint the door with watercolour on every frame and I feel the results still look good. Even though the visual change in the door is noticeable, I feel like it adds to the novelty and charm of the characters interacting with their surroundings.

 Not only does the background and Lucy's physical appearance change throughout the three stages of the animation, but so does her physicality. When I animated her as a kid I kept in mind throughout something Oscar mentioned to me that kids never stay still. Even when they are seemingly doing nothing, for example sitting at a school desk, staring at the clock, they are still tapping on the table with their hands or kicking their feet. To enforce this idea I tried to imagine that every surface Lucy touched was slippery, so if she leans on a surface, her arm slides. Then as she gets older she obviously moves less, so when she's 17 I tried to keep her physical movements more subtle. The breathing I think works just about, but when I asked for feedback, Eleanor pointed out to me that it looks a bit odd that while her chest moves, her head stays completely static of which I agreed once it had been pointed out to me.