15 second animation PART TWO (OUAN403)

Ah god I haven't updated this blog in so long. I recently finished the animation. here it is:


Little Rascals from Christopher Hoare on Vimeo.

And there's a lot I've learnt and a lot that I think I can improve. The biggest problem I faced ended up being technical. I often found that sometimes, out of the blue, if I wanted to copy something like a still character and paste it onto the next frame, Photoshop would just place it into an entirely new layer. But then again sometimes it didn't. So I ended up with all these extra layers cluttering up my screen. Towards the end of the project I had about 33 layers in various groups and scattered about and it stressed me out a bit. Otherwise, I enjoyed animating on Photoshop. There weren't that many limitations to it in the end and I got the hang of most of it, although I haven't done anything involving camera panning or zooming in yet, or even adding in more than one variety of shot.

I'm pleased with the actual quality of the animation, though. I'm glad that I started out with very simple looking characters while I focused on building confidence with digital drawing, and I think I'm getting better. I'm also pleased with the way that the bear turned out. Drawing it involved using more complicated measurements and ratios than drawing the two boys. For those characters I just used the basic guideline that their heads were the same height as their torsos. Now I'm keen to move onto something a little more complex. I'm pleased with the way that I applied the twelve principles of animation. The little rascals themselves have good timing to them and move very organically, and I'm getting a little better at predicting how many frames a certain action will require, which allows for more fluid keyframing.

Man, look at the stretch on that rock. And look at his weird disproportionately sized hands.

I animated this entirely with key frames, and the only straight ahead animation I did was for the flying rocks, the beehive and the leaves and the bees and stuff like that. I don't really buy into the argument that straight ahead animation allows the artist more freedom because they don't have guidelines to follow. I think that key frame animation allows just as much freedom. Occasionally I would add a few frames of space in between my keys to free up the opportunity for some extra anticipation or some slow in or slow out.

When I was bored I added leaves in, to create a living world.