Flandre begins her assault (Patreon)

I'm finally entering the action stage. With the introduction out of the way, the fight will truly begin here. If that means that the work load moving forward will be harder or easier is yet to be seen. Technically speaking, animation is difficult, but I figured that action scenes, for me at least, are much easier, especially when they are widely spaced.

This scene follows the previous one of her jumping out of Yuuma's attack and then counterattacks. She's going to be shooting projectiles out of her hand but I'll do effects later. If you notice, the little crystals on her wings jitter a bit. That's going to loop for a few frames as she's flying back, and I have not gotten this to look right yet. This is my current attempt:

But it looks so stiff and mechanical rather than natural. She's flying in the air but isn't exactly soaring, so I can't make them go crazy. This is also the reason why her neckerchief is red here. It was supposed to be animated, but I don't think she's going fast enough to warrant even a little flap. So I'm reconsidering just making her crystals static, or if I need to animated them, I'll just do that in post-production with the video editor rather than animate it myself.

I'm now working on the next cut of Yuuma countering the attacks with her giant spork. My idea is to have her spin it, which I suspect people will expect to see that at some point. Here is so far the rough draft:

I don't recall the last time I animated this type of movement. I had to look up a video for reference of someone spinning a staff to understand how this works.

Another challenge for this cut is trying to figure out how to present it. I need to think of a transition to this pose first, which I'm considering have the camera zoom in on her face before a wipe effect cuts to her spinning her giant spork. I'm also trying to think of Yuuma's position in the camera. Just a lot of stuff to consider.

Every cut is a puzzle to figure out, but once you do it will be worth it.