1898-1946 Young Bedouin man blowing (bagpipe) instrument.

Above is my progress so far on this animation.  I like the colors, but they’re too monotone and the bag is too blue.  I’m working on cleaning up the colors on the second frame, they’re a bit out of line.  Most of the faded areas have been lightened or darkened with level adjustment layers.  I’ll probably clean them up a little more, especially around his belt area where there was a bit of extra scratching.

While cleaning some scratches and spots, I noticed that dot (left) on his hand was on both frames. It’s a fly, I could probably have a little fun with that, there’s not much room for any other sort of environmental movement.

I’ll probably crop it a bit closer, but I like to keep it big until they get closer to complete.  His hands will have some pretty drastic movement, at least compared to what I’ve done so far.  The blowing movement with his cheeks will also be an interesting challenge. Then the movement of the bag, potentially with moving layers of the pipe and hands above… but that might be too much.  Perhaps I can just adjust the shadow around his arm to create the illusion of inflation/deflation.

I’ve shied away from too much movement for a couple of reasons.  Mostly because the way I create the movement.  I’ll be tracing his hands and making a new layer of them two times, one for each side of the stereo – I’ll just call them frames since that’s what they become in the animation.  Then I make a new layer for each frame recreating what would be under his hand if he’s moving – the background.  Otherwise, when I create the movement, you would see his original hands under the moving hands and well… I’m not really into sci-fi animations yet.  I don’t know if that makes much sense, but when I get to that point I’ll use the animation to illustrate.

The other problem is the movement itself.  I’ll have to work his fingers like like cut out dolls, piecing together joints and creating new skin in the bends then softening up the edges.  Sometimes I’ll warp them but for this that will kill the quality because the amount of warp it would take, the definition would be lost, shadows would blur, etc.

That’s getting a little deep into it, but that’s where I’m at so far.  Would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.