Reference for that shot I did earlier.  I see how I need to adjust the matte painting based upon where Ayu is supposed to be standing (the transparent plank) and the bus stop post.  The nice thing about this is that it actually makes my work easier in a way.

After those previous shots this one went by like a breeze. I should animate only wide shots from now on.

Nothing to say today.  I'm stopping to eat a late dinner before work tomorrow.  I'll leave this here too, since it's what I was listening to when I stopped:
http://youtu.be/ALfjaHF2jYY

Very little has changed in this shot so far.  I've only tweaked existing frames.  I did was raise the hemline and shorten the jacket by a couple inches to match the rest of the film, and gave the skirt a little more of a bell shape, as well as a few fold lines.  I also made Ayu's head slightly bigger to make sure she's 6 heads tall.  Generally I hope more shots are sorta like this, because I'd like to preserve (in this case) as much of Tori's original coloring work as possible.  Of course I'm probably going to have to color this times 3 more frames since I'm about to inbetween this shot to bring it up from 3s (8 frames per second in the film) to 1s or my typical variable timing method (I think I had a professor say it's the "European timing system"?  Either way, typically most American animators prefer to hold a single frame rate per shot, but as I've seen in both Japanese and European Animation, sometimes this seems a little unnecessary.  It honestly depends on the speed of the motions in the shot or what's needed to make sure all the subtle nuances you want to animate get across.  I'd love to always animate on 3s (1/3rd the work of animating on 1s), but for the most part it tends to be too choppy for the kind of slow, subtle movements of these characters- at least that's how I felt in the original version of this film.

One thing to note on this shot is that this was one of the first in the film that used the Hanna-Barbera technique for limited animation.  While other shots may have had still parts of the character, they were either redrawn or copy pasted and then drawn upon (paint animation technique).  This one, literally has a layer (equivilant of cel) that stays on for the parts of Ayu that hold still.  From this point on I continued to use this method since it's easier to maintain if you want to make adjustments and has no real drawbacks.

I just noticed I forgot to tag this shot in Photoshop.  I'll have that in the next update.

So like I said before, I felt that perhaps more drawings needed to be added to the animation of Ayu...so I did just that- and the result are smoother ease-ins and better timing all around that I feel takes the animation from just being animated to feeling more like a living picture.

BEHOLD.