Some scenes needed certain imagery to be above/below other imagery so that when animating the object would seem as though it passes underneath some parts. For example, in the scene with the leaves hanging over the background, which you shall see in a minute, I had to find a way to remove the leaves from the image so that when replaced a character can be animated underneath.
Again, the idea was to keep it on one layer so that I could easily remove it and save as a separate file to go over the background. Unfortunately, like the rest of the images, the file had dozens of unnamed layers.
This didn’t seem too bad at first, as it only meant going through each one until the right layer with the image I was looking for was on it. Unfortunately, it turned out that the other layers were affecting the look of the layer I needed to export. This would mean exporting the layer on its own would make the exported image look different than the final image design. This of course meant I had to locate the extra layers needed and modify them so could export the part as needed.
Again it wasn’t hard to do; it all just took up a lot of time which I could have been spent on animating.
In the end I couldn’t finish all the scenes I was given as time was running out and I needed to think about other projects so the remainder of scenes that I couldn’t finish were sent back to Anja to finish. (only one or two scenes. These scenes were only short though and hopefully would have been quicker to animate for Anja as she most likely understood her layer sequencing of her images better I did.
Here are the finished animations, they are all in one compilation. This is so that it was easier to upload to blogger.
Oh, and these are the actual videos I sent to Anja, so if you are wondering why there are so many periods where it stays still, well it is so the files can be put into animatic straight away. the timing gaps are fo voice overs, or where something else will be happening with the video.
