Backgrounds

Once I finished the handdrawn animation, I moved onto the backgrounds. I didn't do them chronologically, instead I started with the travel sequence, then I painted the post travel sequence scenes, then the pre-travel sequence forest scenes. I definitely got better the more backgrounds I painted, so the quality of them varies a bit.

Overall, I found this really hard but very rewarding. Digital background paintings is very new for me, but it's something I love looking at in other animations, so I wanted to get better at it. I'd done a lot of research on colour and lighting, but I found that time was what helped me the most. The longer I spent, the better the painting turned out. Most of these took 3/4 of a day, but for a couple of the harder ones (the downhill stormy one and the first forest scene), it took me 1 and a half to 2 days, however these are the ones that I think turned out best.

When painting these, I had to make sure everything was on a different layer to enable me to composite, and I had to think about what was going to happen in the scene so I could animate it (i.e. any zooms or parrallax, any clouds moving etc.)

I also wanted to get the overall colour right, as the short should progress from morning to night as evenly as possible, and I think I managed that pretty well. The film's colour moves from a dark greenish, to a bright greenish, and finally to a dark orange. This reflects the emotional journey of the story very well which I'm happy with.

Overall I'm very proud of these even though I know there's a lot for me to improve, and background painting is something I want to practice and get better at.