Worker Bee Landing On Flower

Bit of progress after scanning in sections of the flower. I've been considering framing. I didn't want too much of the flower showing. Colour wise I'm not 100% convinced that visually the red/yellow flower and  the yellow bee work together however against a blue background it all stands out quite nicely.

Queen Bee Gif Animation

Another small tester animation I made a while ago but hadn't yet uploaded. 

Making Backgrounds & Cut outs

Using the wings as a stencil to create patterns for my ending credits. I have done this with a variety of colours. Some of the colours aren't featured in the animation, such as purple, so I don't know if it will fit, but it's always good to try out different things. I prefer these to the computer generated backgrounds I created previously, I intend for my animation to look very hand made so this approach suits it better.

Proboscis, drone, queen and worker heads, toast and honey, leg with pollen basket and arrows.

A side profile drone, petals and knives.

Creating a guard bee.

Sketch book page - bee doodles.

Backgrounds and scenery

Created a few more props and scenery for the animation and scanned them in. These pieces will all fit together to create a kitchen scene and will hopefully work along side my narration. They look much better photographed than in person so I think in terms of the animation, visually it's going to fit together quite well on screen.

Creating the basic shape for background trees on the reverse of the paper.

Just seeing how it looks against the intended blue backdrop. I will tweak the colours a bit in photoshop.

Making stems and leaves.

Decided to make flowers by layering different coloured papers.

I quite like the result. The paper had been coloured using inks, brush strokes are visible and I quite like the look of this on my flowers.

All the pieces together

Decided to add more detail to the leaves with a different shade of green. The beauty of paper cut out is that you can make intricate details, though these are quite simple shapes.

Creating a tiny bee for the honey pot, it was quite fiddly actually.

Seeing how it looks against a blue background, but in actual fact I think it will sit against a wall paper effect instead.

Not a set font, curvy lettering trailing behind the bee, sort of like a bee line. 

Tried another approach for making flowers, just for a bit of variation. The beauty of after effects is that I can repeat and image over and over so I could create a whole field of flowers with no problem. 

Like the leaves, decided to add more detail to the developmental stages of the egg/larvae/pupae.

Creating a table

Cut out loads of thin strips of green to make a checker board sort of pattern. I later cut this to make a table cloth and curtain. 

Layering papers to make a bee box. Glue got on the image, but I don't think I will clean up the blemish on the computer, bee boxes are never pristine are they?

Worker bee in flight 2

I have sped up the animation slightly. Hopefully this movement is more convincing. I will have the bee landing on a flower.

Worker Bee in flight 1

Short animation for the worker bee in flight, my first attempt at this, I want the worker landing on a flower but I'm really struggling with creating natural movement even after referencing many videos and spending so much time watching bees.




 The movement doesn't seem natural enough. it's a bit slow. But a quick tester for moving my bee about on the screen. Jittery movement can be useful for inferring the wind, but it will end up being too unnatural if it's not smooth enough.

Gif animations

Making short testers in photoshop but i prefer the smoothness of animation with after effects. 

The first gif file had the images in the wrong order, hence why the bee above is moving backwards. 

Though I do quite like the jittery movement stop frame animation creates.