I've been working further into 'The Bird' by developing an elephant walk for another of the African scenes alongside altering some of the animation on the zebra as there wasn't enough variation in each zebra for the viewer to not notice they were similar.
Below are the results of the zebra, I've not done much to the actual movement as all zebras move the same in terms of gait, so I've altered the head movement of a few and changed stripe design.
I found the elephants easier to animate, probably because they don't exhibit the same flurry of legs the zebra does and they move at a slower rate. Below are two cycles, one of an adult elephant, another is a baby with the baby completing a cycle faster than the adult because there's the obvious factoring in weight and size in comparison.
And then for Claws for Concern I coloured the bear to see how he would fit into the background and after the weekly feedback session I was asked to remove the outlines completely as the background itself doesn't have any outline work so the other experiment is to see if no outline can work. TV paint didn't totally remove the outline however from what was achieved with a faint outline it didn't look too bad as the issue was removing the outline would cause the arm and legs to become lost within the body.
Before I removed the outline from the entire animation, I did a test image, one was completely removed, the other I swapped outline colour so a dark grey outline accompanied the light grey body and the light grey outline went with the dark grey shadows. I felt toning the black outline down might look less detracting and bold but it didn't make much difference.
The shadows were also redone in the test below as it was mentioned in the feedback session I didn't quite get the lighting correct in terms of where the bear was in the background.