COP2 Visual Response: More Research and Character design

I decided to use flash to animate. I have never used flash and I have to learn from the basics by looking at youtube video and experiment with different tools. I think this is a good opportunity to test with other animating tool that I have never used before but it is also timing consuming at the same time. Considering the time I have left till submission, I think it is manageable to try some new techniques and applied in my animation. 

There are a lot of tutorials online and I just randomly chose one to start with, This guys did quite well explaining the tools and other basics but not really useful in demonstrating the animating process.

I learnt a lot of hot keys from this video, he shows many useful short cuts and the use of the tools and talk about symbols and tweens as well which is very useful.

Although this video is very long and boring, it shows the production of a short animation. He demonstrates how to animation effectively and use a lot of hot keys and layers as well and i think I could start animating after looking at all these useful videos online.

I started with basic line drawings on different layers that enable efficient colouring afterwards.

Then I export the images and edit them in photoshop so that I could can more beautiful background that are done in photoshop instead because flash does not really good in colouring and less colouring options then photoshop.

I used very thin outline on every thing I draw and they need to match the backgrounds that I was producing. The backgrounds are very similar to the Princess Knight. Most of the early anime backgrounds are created by watercolour and poster colour. I also look  at old disney films' background and found out snow white has close aesthetic that I would like to combine both into my animation. The watercolour background is very beautiful and could make the character stands out.

I want to maintain the anime style through the backgrounds so they are not going to be like the sleeping beauty's and princess mononoke's which are not anime style and too realistic. I like the snow white background because it shows some mysterious aspect of a forest and the trees are very similar to the trees in Princess Knight. I am going to mimic watercolour through Photoshop and experiment different brush and strength,hoping to get a good result.

The characters design of the main character at the first part of the animation. There are a lot of similarities with Princess Knight and I do hope audience to relate my character with the old style. The head is relatively big so that the emotion could be shown more clearly while the hands and the body shape is very similar to the reference. I only use blue on her dress because this would make her stand out from the forest but not being too obvious than using red. The curly hair is also a main feature of the design that it appears in many female characters back in 1960's.