More Direction

I've decided to expand from doing the one scene for my directed study.

The Character Study 2 walk has been developing and has developed in different areas, but I'm deciding to include more scenes.

One will be of a run cycle of my character, Farmer Shel, showing the desperation of the situation.
Another will be a centered shot of my tornado, giving cue as to what he runs away from.

Each shot will use a set of different techniques, done mostly digitally, with workflows that are similar to what I was going through under the camera when I was shooting stop-motion scenes earlier this semester.
One example is of the shadow I animated for my run cycle.

Shadow
For my character, I wanted to create a better sense of the dramatic atmosphere.  From that I came up with the effects for the storm in my Character Study 2 scene.
Although I felt there was a disconnect from the look of my character and the scene he has been put in.  I felt there wasn't enough of a dramatic quality - I look towards lighting him in high key.
High key is known for it's dramatic quality in film language, so I thought it was appropriate.
This meant that my character had to have shadows.

What came up was drawing it frame-by-frame, which would be a heavy task knowing how many more tracking points I'd have to be mindful as I animate.
This seemed daunting.
But I experimented and wound up going with a technique in After Effects.

I created a black solid and masked out several shapes on the character where the shadow would be.
Then I went with straight ahead animation, going frame to frame moving and reshaping the black masks.
This workflow very much resembled what I did in shooting the sand and torn paper, having objects I am manipulating each frame as opposed to creating each time.  The main difference was that I was able to go back and edit previous frames and there was no camera capturing necessary.

Here's what my run cycle looked like originally:

This was made in the same way I made the run cycle, drawing frames in TV Paint, colouring there and in After Effects using mattes.

One change I made was to move the mattes with the character's movement as opposed to leave it be static in space while the line animates around it.

Then I animated the shadow as I described above, and topped it off with a dark atmospheric background to describe the sky.

This is what it looks like now:

The next thing I am going to tackle is the tornado.  As of now I am planning to draw the outline in 2D, then experiment with different ways to texture it ranging from stop-motion tests I've done before, to After Effects textures, to even overlaying video footage.

We'll see how it turns out.