Progress So Far...

After completing the backgrounds, I was able to start animating! Firstly, I drew in the keyframes on top of the backgrounds:

The first scene contains the alarm clock buzzing, signalling the start of the day. At first, I struggled to tackle the issue of how the alarm would be switched off (since it switching off by itself doesn't make sense) and fitting my character into the original frame I drew proved to be difficult.

My original visualisation of scene 1

I realised it would be better to emphasise the clock, so making it larger on the screen seemed to be the best idea; It also solves my issue of fitting my character into the picture, since now I can just have a close up of his hand hitting the clock.

Scene 1

Scene 2 proved to be easier to animate, since it only took a few frames to complete the arm action.

Scene 2

After doing this, I animated the cloud above his head. I visualised it moving quickly and moving at the same pace throughout the film, so I drew in a few frames and experimented with the speed at which it moves on the timeline. I ended up concluding that having it span across 3 frames (at 24 fps) had it moving at the best speed.

Scene 2 cloud timeline

It took me a while to get scene 3 right; I wanted it to look heavy and slow, as if he is reluctant to walk down the stairs. I thought the best way to do this was to exaggerate his actions; the first frame is the highest point during a sigh. I wanted to show that he is taking a really deep breath, so extending his chest was the more obvious way to do this.

Scene 3

After getting the exaggeration, I had to make him move. At first I thought putting in lots of steps would be the best way to slow him down - but that would mean using more frames.
Instead it was suggested to me by my classmate that I just put in a few steps that he plods down on heavily, and pause on every step.
This proved to make the action clearer and simpler, yet it looked better.

Scene 3

For scenes 4 & 5, I wanted to use the same character drawings for both scenes, because one background fades into the other:

Scenes 4 & 5 merged together

I realised after drawing my character in the right place between both scenes, the door was too low down, giving the impression that my character is very tall. So I selected and enlarged the door and windows of background 4 to make it look like this (underneath):

Scene 4 with the door enlarged

After this I added in him sighing, but timed it between the fading in-and-out of the two scenes, to make the animation flow better.

Overall, I think my animation is going well. After cutting out a few scenes from my original storyboard it has made it a lot easier to slow down the movements, which work better with the theme of the story.