The Classical Elements: That's Right, Another Update.

Since my previous update, I have been animating the girl in the story. I have got her breathing in and blowing out the candles, which seems to work fine. Once I had finished this, it meant that I could then go back and add the background behind the candles, which would be the green of the girl character's t-shirt. A slight problem arose when I was doing this. When the camera angle changes and shows the candles stood in a row from a different perspective, I didn't know whether to have the backdrop still as all green, or to be more realistic and show the girl's arm and the rest of the walls. By doing this it gave away that the green is the girl's shirt, and I wasn't sure whether I liked that. I felt this would change the impact of the reveal (that they are sat on a cake). Because of this, I decided to just stick with the green backdrop to ensure that the impact would be greater when it is revealed to the viewer that they are on a cake, and are in fact birthday candles.

 Green Background Test

I went ahead and tested the background to make sure that this is what I wanted to do for definite and I think it works fine. I think it would have been nice to see the girl's arm/side so that there would be a change of background which would make it more interesting to watch, but I didn't like how this would change the impact, as I said previously.

Another element that I was unsure of was the cake. 

To create the cake background that you can see when the camera is zoomed in on the candles, I simply took the original cake drawing and scaled it, making it bigger. Because the original drawing was quite small, when I did this it meant that it looked pixelated. At first I didn't like how this looked and was going to paint over it again so that it would look smooth, just like the rest of the drawings/characters. The more I watched my animation through the more this pixelated look grew on me, as it looked as though it was out of focus, drawing more attention to the characters, which I thought was great. It also meant that when the cake was scaled back to it's original size it came "back into focus", which I thought was fitting, as this is where I wanted the focus to be in that scene, along with the female character. 

For the time being I am going to leave the cake as it is, as I like this out of focus feel it gives. It is possible that I shall ask others for their opinions later, and if needs be I can always draw over it.