Week 11
For this part of the task I had to finish part of the animation loop. So firstly I started with a sketch of the character to get the idea of the movement. I also made sure to draw the main key frame poses to get the most important parts out of the way. I also had to make sure that the character looked close enough to the character on the reference sheet. So i pasted it so I can always have a reference by my side.
As I was working on the animation, a teacher gave me feedback for animation. The thing that I to adjust was the character herself as it didn’t feel solid. So, I used the character poses from the animatic and then begun adding the lineart or add any extra frames that are needed. I also began working on the bag animation as I had the animation necessary for the character to understand the timing of the bag. Once, that is done, I added some colour to the character and the bag on each frame they are visible. Lastly I made sure the background was green so I can then use the chroma key feature on apps like after effects or premier.
Afterwards, I opened After Effects and dragged all of my assets into the scene and began using the animation tool to make a panning shot of the scene. Once I was satisfied with it, It was time to export the file and upload it on Youtube. Now, this is only one part of the whole looped animation. At the moment not all of the classmate have it done, but I will update this blog with the full video.
References
For references, I really enjoyed the way fighting games create their animations by using strong pose with a good silhouette and using just enough frames to create power and impact. So I wanted mine to make sure to have readable poses that aren’t confusing and unclear by putting brighter colours on character so people can focus on her much easier. I also made sure to look at real life examples like the Rocky movies as they have a lot of scenes where they hit punching bags to get an idea of the timing.
https://streetfighter.fandom.com/wiki/Makoto/Sprites
Overall, I am pretty happy with how it turned out. Personally I really liked how I drew the poses and kept close to the reference of the charater. However, I feel like there are some thinks I could have done better. For example, add just a few more frames to the character. There was also another issue where I didn’t know how to make the background of the animation transparent in adobe animate. So, I had to use the chroma key. But in turn, it made the image a bit pixalated. So maybe next time, I need to understand the software that I am using better.