2D 'Destroy your bird'

After loving making my owl fly, I then had to destroy him for my next task. Additionally, I had to add sound effects in TVPaint.

Firstly, I needed to change the colour of my owl as I wanted my scene to be set at night. In the brief it said to include moving clouds, however I wanted to bend the rules slightly and make stars move instead. 

QuickTime messed up my colours in these progress videos, however it fixed itself for the final video.(I don't know why either...) I used a painting brush to make the sky textured, almost like it was painted using watercolour. I also changed the colour of my owl to purple tones so it would blend better with the background.

Here I planned out my lightning action on a separate layer and then drew out the line art for it and for the bird being destroyed. At first I wasn't sure how to make the owl disappear, but I made it disintegrate into feathers as I felt it fitted the lightning action. Additionally, I coloured the line art in grey at this stage as I wanted to show a burnt effect. I then added colour, keeping some change in tones on the owl from the different coloured feathers.

This was my first finished version. (and this is how the background is supposed to look) I used FX Stacks to make the stars move across, and had to make 2 layers of this as the first layer cut off half way through. I have never used this technique before, and I had no idea how to use it, but I managed to figure it out with some experimenting. I also added the lightning strike with a white flash as the FX action.

However, after getting some feedback I found the change to be too sudden, and not very effective. Therefore I added in some black and white flashes, my birds skeleton, and a faded background for a more intense FX animation.

I then added a sound effect for the lightning, which I think helped make the action more dramatic. I wanted to add sound effects for the whole animation, but most of the lightning audio clips had rain in them, which I didn't include in my animation. If I had more time I would change the stars to rain.

To improve I would make the stars move slower (it took so long to work out the FX stack feature that I'm now terrified to touch my existing FX) and I want to learn how to make existing colours adjust to environments, for example moving my owl to a night scene.