25 Second Animation - Animating From Reference and Animating Some More Shots (OUAN405)

Normally, walk cycles are rather easy. A drunk, blind chimp could animate one.

At least, it's easy to draw a walk cycle along a two dimensional plain. Sometimes I just wish I lived in the world of 1960s Scooby Doo because everything exists on a 2D plain and life is simpler

I also want to live in the world of Scooby Doo so I could commit hilarious crimes.

Literally me af

But SOMETIMES I have to draw a walk cycle from a weird angle or something. And for those drawings I have learned to use REFERENCE for the first time.

For the shot where the man walks across the road, I filmed my coursemate AND REGULAR MATE (I hope) Alex, walking. I didn't rotoscope it but the footage was really handy for reference.

Later on, when I needed a shot of the same character hobbling across a street, I waited for Alex to come into the studio before hobbling him with a crowbar for a look of autheticity. Then I filmed him limping.

In the same week, I animated my final shot which was one of the most time consuming. I decided to animate every element of the character individually as it gave me more control. Also, since the limping from a distance was hard to animate, breaking it up into portions made it less daunting.

The downside was that I could not merge all the elements of the character into a single video layer because it made Photoshop call me a dumb idiot and spit acid in my eyes and I had to "ctrl+z" it a few times, so it was very irritating having to juggle all the layers of the character.

All these layers are for this one annoying character.

I'm pleased with the shot, though. I imported way too many layers into After Effects, though, which made it crash which was annoying.