Hallmark - Production - Scene 1

I have narrowed down my storyboard to three scenes: The flower waving in the wind with the bee approaching, then a close up shot of the flower kissing the bee and the third scene will be the shot zooming out to reveal the Hallmark Logo.

 

The first think I did was import the Hallmark logo and blow it up so that only bits of the 'H' and 'a' could be seen.

 Animating the waving flower was a little more difficult than I anticipated. Taking into consideration slow in and slow out effects as well as the overlapping action was a lot to focus and in retrospect I think I should have animated the body first and gone back to animate the overlapping leaves. Too little too late, I animated it all at the same time! I got through it with some personal video referencing:

 

Frame set-up:

 

In terms of arranging the Key a and in between frames, I had to take a different route than my typical method of animation. I arranged the key frames as well as the first two in between frames in more of a straight ahead fashion in between the keys. I found it easier to capture the flow of the flower using this method.

 

The Bee:

 

Boy was this embarrassing. My intentions were good, however I had to readjust this scene many times. I created a separate layer to draw a path for the bee to follow when he approached the flower. On that same layer, I circled the key frames (orange), and the in betweens (green, blue). I wanted the bee to have a roller-coaster effect when traveling. What you see above is my second attempt at arranging the circles. After the third, I realized I should simply animate straight ahead and that was when it worked. 

Lastly, I thought I would lower the opacity on the Hallmark logo to give it a more background feeling as well as add a soft pink background to give it a sweeter aesthetic.

Here is the first scene completed: