Animating my film

With all my models, props and set build I started to animate my film. My film was broken up into which sets I would use, how hard the shot was going to be and if I would need Ashley help animating it or not. Ashley used up some of her hours working on my film, because I had so many charactors in some sences I would need a extra pair of hands to animate.
The first shot I did was the close up of the Robots head, this was a very easy shot to do and it concised of taking one picture the rest was to be done later on After effects or shake to get the arrow to move.
The next shot I did was some more stills of the far away set, I just wanted to do some test and see what is would look like, as I was going to have a meeting with Sean later that week I wanted to show him what it would look like.
I also did a test of the Main Pigeon walking.
After meeting up to go over some of my early animation with Sean. He said that it was hard to tell the differance between the grain and the gravel floor, I took this on board and after looking at stopmotion television shows like Bob the Builder and Pingu I decinded to go for a much simplar set. The path the hills became just chalk on card. Everything else like the Robot and the sky was left the same.

Having to changed the gravel floor was kind of a bless in disguse, I was finding it a pain to animate with the gravel as it was always moving and getting stuck into the pigeons feet. I spent half my time sorting out the pigeons feet before I could start the next shot.
Animating was going smooth, people didn't really notice the change in sets, like from small pigeons to big pigeons which was great. I found it hard to animate the smaller pigeon because they couldn't move much I want screen time down to a minuman with them, but they had to be some long shots.
I enjoyed working with Ashley, she helped me alot, she brought a fresh pair of eyes and could see things I couldn't see, althought sometimes a though she was to ruff with my models, but I think that was me just getting over protective.
I found the seagull to be the worse thing to animate, everything else move nicely and did what I wanted it to do, but not the seagull. I think when making it I was itching to start animating and rushed him. He didn't really turn out like designed and I found him bulky. Lucking he wasn't in many shots. I had some shots where the seagull was in the sky, here he had to be rigged up. When rigging up a model I used thin fishing wire the a medal frame, rigging is hard and you have to be patient. When you use wire the model takes a long time to settle after you move it so you've got to wait each time or you get a blared picture. I found that out the hard time more then once.

I put this shot in because it shows me working with Ashley and with the seagull.

So sence where I would have needed a rig like the pigeon falling off the bench and the seagull driving I decided that this would be easier to do on after effect or shake.
It took me about a month to animate.

Here's some of my early animation tests, this first one is Pigeon walking to robot foot, on the old set: