Before moving onto the proper boarding process, I knew I wanted the ghosts to look slightly different from each other, to make them more interesting (both individually and as a duo). I drew these simple designs, and was fairly satisfied with them: my main inspirations were Pac-Man and his own ghosts, as I wanted them to be simple and charming enough to be the main focus of the animation. The colour schemes complemented one another and worked with the limited color palette I’d decided on, and small differences like the eyes and mouth help them look more unique.

With the designs basically finalized, I moved onto storyboarding. The idea remained basically the same (ghosts fly in, consume a specific food item from the wall, and fly off), but I polished it up from my original thumbnails to be more appealing and easier to follow. The ghosts would now move in flowing arcs, and their designs would be “silhouetted”, meaning no parts of their bodies overlap: they all stay a part of their outline, like shadows, so their arms just extend out of their main form.

After some very basic timing tests, I started working on the rough animation for the left ghost. Following advice from the tutors, I would try and complete most of its animation first before moving onto the next ghost: it would act as a proof of concept for the animation by the time I got to present it to the museum (and it could act as a failsafe in case I didn’t get to finish the other ghost in time).

Its body is essentially just a circle with a tail, so the movement was easy to sketch out: I made sure to give it some squash and stretch when it moved faster, and I ended up being quite pleased by this initial movement.

But then came the hard part: I had given it a scene where it grabs the bottle of Coca-Cola, opens its mouth, lifts it up to drink it, and then eats the bottle and retracts its arm back into its body as it turns around to enter the museum’s window. When boarding, I hadn’t realized how difficult this would be to pull off, and I definitely got nervous when the time came to rough out the animation.

It took a few tries to get right, but I eventually reached a movement I was satisfied with. I had the arm basically wrap itself back into the body, which worked better as the body turns around. I think it’s a little hard to read when in motion, but I cant think of a better way to have done it, and it definitely makes for an interesting movement that could only be done with such a loose character design.

With its body animation done (meaning the only thing left are the eyes and closed mouths), I started trying to refine the animation before presenting it to the museum’s staff. I made a simple transition for the beginning and end, showing the colours flowing in and out of the door’s middle window.

And to make sure the museum people understood what I was going for, I made a mock-up of what I’m expecting the final video to look like (using my favorite frame from the storyboards as a base).

Overall, they seemed to like my project and the direction I was going for. They had some feedback, of course: mainly making the background more interesting (which I’d been thinking about before the meeting) and changing the colours to better fit the museum’s brand identity. The latter was one I was a bit bummed out by, as I was happy with the colour scheme I’d chosen and thought it lent itself well to the Halloween vibe, but I’ll test the animation with the official colours and see how they work.

At the moment, I’m focusing on the white ghost’s animation. The rough bodyshape animation and timing has been done and looks fine, so now I’m trying to make the extras (the arm and mouth movement) look good too. It’s been a struggle, but I’ll keep trying.

The biggest struggle so far (besides animating on 2s, which takes forever but is very rewarding) has been dealing with Harmony. When it works, it’s great, but files are constantly getting corrupted, going missing, having random layers arbitrarily stop working, and so on. I luckily never fully lost anything as I always back up my data, but having to fix my files nearly everyday has gotten tiring.

Overall, I think it’s going fairly well. There’s still a good deal left to do, and a few things I’ll want to go back and fix once everything’s been done, but if everything goes according to plan I should end up with a project I can be proud of.