Did some more complete animation of a bird's flight cycle.
Did some extremely simple animation showing the basic phases of flight that I'd observed in the videos I've taken and the birds I've seen. (Excluding deceleration and landing phases - but deceleration has the same sort of large wing movements as acceleration as the bird tries to throw air in front of it rather than under it.) Did some drawings after looking at some birds flying around outside - making notes on some of the observations I made. One observation I did make was how stunningly little movement is actually noticable for the majority of flight. On take off, landing, and sudden sharp changes in direction and speed, there can be lots of wing movement, lots of up and down, but most of the time the birds in the air, there's very little movement at all.
It's at low speed that there's significant wing movements - hence why birds intending to launch or land have significant amounts of high I went out down to the waterfront here in Bristol, and tried to get some video of pigeons walking, taking off and landing. I got this one to do a little bit of flight for me by throwing a scrunched up receipt at it. I then took that video, and rotoscoped it in Flash. Then, I had a go at trying to make it loop a little bit by taking some of the frames from earlier in the cycle. Also at Noah's Ark Farm, we filmed a bunch of birds as well. 0:00-3:46 - The Chicken enclosure 3:47-8:21 - The birds of prey show |