Brody´s Ghost video - part I

Here are the links for the other posts in this Brody´s Ghost video series:

• Introduction (part 0)
• this post
• part II
• part III
• part IV
• Final part

In the last post, I have written about my plans for a new video. The first part is the ghost Kagemura arriving to the center of the screen and turning his head to the camera.

I have started with the part where he turns his head, because that is the harder one. It involves changes of shapes which means I need to draw all frames by hand. The action of turning head is a slow one so I think it´s not necessary to aim for 24 frames per second. 12 frames, where each will be played twice could do the trick.

I started by drawing the first pose (profile) and then 11 more, each time turning his head slightly. The goal (the first picture and last picture) is shown below.

I should also point out for those people who have read Brody´s Ghost comics or seen this character somewhere, that my version is not 100% accurate and I don´t even want it to be. I´ve simplified some parts, because the characters must look the same (or at least very similar) in each frame and that´s hard enough even without all the proper details flying everywhere.

To the method of drawing I use is very primitive and I have mentioned it a little in one of my previous posts. It´s necessary to make the blank transparent paper (new frame) be exactly on top of the previous frame and make it not move. My solution for this is on the picture below and it works just fine.
 Another quite important fact is, that the A4 paper has a wrong size. The Youtube format is 16:9 and A4 is different. Which is why I also have a blank white paper with a 25 cm x 14 cm big rectangle in the middle, which approximately represents the frame. And I put this paper under the transparent papers so it´s visible. It would be a solution to draw or print this rectangle on each transparent paper. But I don´t like to waste my time doing things I don´t need, it´s easier to use one of the features of transparent paper - transparency.

Below is the picture of all 12 pictures/frames I have drawn for this particular scene (part I) of the video. Just to show that I am not cheating if anybody suspected me.

And the result can be seen in a video below. I played every frame twice, plus the first one and last one. These are shown for a little longer. By every frame twice, I mean every frame is shown for 0.08 second. Which means that technically, I am drawing at 24 frames per second, but I play the frames at 25 frames per second. And when I am playing every frame twice, it means I am playing them in a spee 12.5 fps. Which doesn´t really matter and it makes no change, I only wanted to mention it.

So, that would be for turning the head.
At the arriving to the screen part, I only took the first frame (profile one), deleted the background (which I described here on another example) and then I made program called Synfig render the frames by moving Kagemura a few pixels each time. Which is 109 frames - 4.5 seconds.