As I’ve been storyboarding I started to realize how I need to change the beginning and ending of my storyline. I had decided to leave out large bits of the original story that were boring and wouldnt work well for animating as I cant do that many characters. So now for example I left out her family story and focus it on her being tricked and lured by the wizard from the sstart. Instead of the stepmom, I will have the lilac flowers appear by her window. Thez are not just any flowers but magical live flowers, that move out of reach and pull away when Blondine tries to pick them. I will animate it sliding out of the window and castle and slipping under the gate.

That creates a chase scene that is much more exciting to watch, and a cleverer way to get her into the forest.

I find it also makes the story better if the parrot was secretly plotting to get her into the forest from the start. I will however keep my medieval tapestry foreshadowing the future in the first scene.

Brief storyline summary

For our brief we had to choose a folktale, and I chose a French story called “Blondine, Bonne Biche et Bon Minon.”
In short, a little blonde princess is tricked by her evil stepmother to enter the cursed magical forest, as she is a jealous woman and hates how much her new husband loves his daughter. Blondine naively goes to pick lilac flowers only to find she cannot return home. Along the way she meets a white cat and a white deer who take her in, and she lives in their palace.
One day a charming parrot visits her, who deceives her, telling her of a red rose she must pick in order to free her from the forest and her supposed capitivity from the white deer.

It is a long story with a long cast of characters, which I will have to adapt and shorten as needed for my animation. The end of the original story has the main character suffer for months, then transported by a turtle to a castle where she finds out the cat and deer are in fact the fairy queen and her son , they were just turned into animals by the evil parrot wizard. The parrot turns out to also be human or shape shifter. At the end she is reunited with her father and marries the fairy queen’s son. It is a long winding tale and the end is too boring…

Beginning

First scene: Sitting on her dads lap on the throne, behind them you see a medieval tapestry of a classic hunting scene, but it features a white deer, cat and a girl riding a tortoise.

Tension buildup

The tension buildup starts when the character cannot escape the forest.

Initially she is peacefully picking flowers and the forest looks beautiful and inviting. When she realizes she is stuck, the environment becomes dark and scary, and trees loom dark and tall around her, branched and thorns entangling her deeper into the dark.

She runs, trying to get away (run cycle scene)

Then she comes across the cat and deer and is taken to safety. (tension dissipates)

Drama

Enter the antagonist: Mister Parrot. A very colorful character so it will make a good scene when he makes his dramatic appearance..

First as a long evil looking shadow then revealed as innocent bird, but it foreshadows what is to come.

Drama ensues when he hypnotizes her with a vision of the magical red rose.

Climax

When she runs towards the red rose, and you see this big glowing red rose that looks alive. I want to make red particles or something float around it.

Close up shot of hand touching it, she bleeds.

Parrot shows his dark evil side, idk if he’ll turn black and then morph into a human shadow or something creepy? I could draw that frame by frame…

Ending

She lies on the ground, and a huge tortoise appears, and carries her away in the mist. Ill either make it a turtle and it swims, or just show the top part of the turtle as I can only make that many walk cycles lol. Unless I can do it in a simple way..

The last scene becomes the same image seen in the tapestry of the first scene.

Only noticed after all the file gathering for the cdp hand in… whoops

Added pins to top part and it kinda helped, i was able to control more of the movement and tweak it…

And here are the armssss it doesnt look 100% smooth ://// idkkkkk

The separating dress thing worked out the skirt looks good. 10000 troubleshooting and pin and repinning yeeet

Now I just need to move the arms and hair. I noticed in my first walk cycle that she kinda hops too far up in the 2nd up, fixed that, my paths are more oval looking now….Also ill try adding starch pins or something to the upper body bc the chest moves a lot…

Close up of legs

I am blind now. literally i cant see.

At first my dress was one whole shape but it didnt work out well because the torso/bodice would warp weirdly… so i decided to do like the guy in the tutorial and split my dress into 2 parts, top portion and a skirt.

This works much better, the top moves with the body and im still doing adjustments to the skirt and other tiny errors I see in my design..