More Backgrounds and Starting to Animate Scene 1

With animating, I started off doing a few sketches of how I imagined the skeletons moving through a walk cycle for different characters. I had to think about the attitude and personalities of the characters in how they walked as the walk cycle's purpose was meant to show how different they all are.

So after I had taken photos of these sketches, I put them in the background of a flash document as a guideline for each character. I drew the skeletons as a first layer.

Then, I went over the skeletons in a layer of colour that suited each character. For example, a pink for what we would consider the most feminine and a dark green for what we could consider the most masculine character. As well as this, I drew each character their own body shape. These shapes were the most imporant in the story to again focus on the character's diverse appearance and how it is impossible for one body type to represent all of them.

After the shapes, I went over in black lines to hint to some more of the characters' features. The clothes were important to some. For example, a boyish hat, baggy jeans and tank top were necessary to hint to the transgender man. He is one character I thought was necessary to include and present in this story due to having to run away from a strong and toxicly gripping identity that many people born with a Y chromosome are just expected to fit in to. 

After animating the walk cycle I decided to put in the background. A watercolour wash of pastel sunset colours I felt were necessary to hint to reality but still the very present features of femininity which linger round the characters in their awkward and un-enlightened day to day life. 

I wanted to add something to the city scape instead of simple but bold blocks of colour so found a nice brush on photoshop to customise simple block shapes I made on MSPaint, a simple but reliable program. 

From this I made copies over and over by each other and put them together as a PNG before adding the to the background on Flash. I made the city scape move along side the characters and their different paces of walking.

A scene consisted of the background zooming in and changing colour as it does, so I edited the background on photoshop to get the colours right for the next part of the animation.

I was happy how this process went and intend to try and animate in the same way with the next scenes. The simple watercolour backgrounds were not too chaotic to do and also I felt very happy with their fluid looking outcomes.