This is probably what it sounds like when doves cry.

I had this great combination of determination, exhaustion, and anxiety last night that somehow convinced me that most of my issues with this film could be solved by cutting out two scenes and adding like...14 or something. I realized that a lot of my animation issues were stemming from trying to do too many actions in one shot instead of cutting, and it only made me reluctant to even bother animating. INSTEAD, I've done up a few things to increase clarity as well as increase the amount of cuts I'm doing per scene.
This is the first part of where Mel gives her the apple to appease her and it doesn't work. She takes it from him, sits down as the camera zooms in a bit, then she looks unamused. He gets on his thinking face and sees the stump behind her. Then it cuts to the part in the middle of the page (hey, I understand it, you don't have to) where he points behind her and she sees the tree shoot up. Then she gets all shocked face, and it cuts to an apple wigglin' in a tree.

Contine to the apple falling (motion blur!) as the screen pans down with her looking at it. Then it lands next to her. She looks up at the tree (I need to switch screen direction on all three of those), a whole bunch of apples fall (After Effects!), and then they sit next to each other and he looks pleased. Then she pushes him.

I think as long as I establish that the tree grows to the point that it sort of looms over them, it should be okay. Right now, it sort of seems too far away.
The other stuff is the redo for the last set of the scenes where she visits him during the seasons. I'm not going to explain that part. I have to animate it next week, anyway.

AND, I know this is a lot of work, but it needs to be done. My film's not coming together like it should and I should've done this a long time ago. I'm technically ahead on my animation anyway. Three of these shots are animated (one I need to fix up a lot, though), and one of them is an adjustment to an earlier scene. I have to do the tree growing scene today and a few of the reaction shots I think.


Look at my progress! I need to darken the lines still, but I might have to batch my PSD files in Photoshop first and bring them into ToonBoom again over my colored layer. ToonBoom doesn't want to darken them any further because they're so light to begin with. The timing's a little off, but I'll probably have to cut off a bit at the beginning anyway when I cut it together. The background doesn't really have buildings yet. I still have to do those :).