Before going fully into rough animation I did some practice drawing the characters and getting used to animation again.
I did a quick test animation of Val. I realised quickly that while I was confident in my ability to get the bodies and their proportions drawn properly I was not as proficient drawing the faces and was struggling to get them right, as a single wrong line would immediately make the character not look like themselves. Because of this, during the rough animation I would place the heads from the model sheets in and use them as reference when doing cleanup.
This made the animation process go by quickly and allowed me to keep on model throughout the process. In instances where there was a still frame of very minimal animation I would go through the whole clean, colour and shading process in order to save time when coming back to these scenes.
Ellie and I made sure to divide the workload evenly between each other, so on our shot list we had split animation fairly evenly, taking the sequences of shots that flowed into each other. Below are examples of shots I am particularly proud of how they look.
For some shots where there were more odd or complex movements I needed to record video reference, which can be seen below. For the shot where Valerie is packing her bag and cut a lot of the frames for the actual animation to remove the dead air. I mostly used these videos as a reference, as I didn’t want to trace or rotoscope them, because it would not be in the style of the rest of the film.