Now I had my pre production done I could start on the production side of things. I broke down what a list of what animation I needed.

• Walk animation.
• Rat: Idle to shock reaction.
• Portal opening.
• Cat appearing.
• Cat Grab and Rat squeeze animation.
• Cat eating animation.
• Cat outro animation.

This was going to be the biggest solo animation I’d ever done before so this helped me compartmentalise what I was doing and break it down into sizable chunks.
I was confident with the walk animation since I had done one as part of my earlier excercises and had learned where I’d gone wrong before.

I still returned to Blair’s Animator’s Survival Kit (2001) for a point of reference before begining. I wanted to avoid following the Angry Animator’s walk cycle again and try to create a walk cycle that would be more unique to the rat.

Obviously the porportions of my rat were vastly different from Blair’s model but I was able to use his demostration as a guide when drawing out my key poses. I had originally toyed with the idea of trying a double bounce with the rat but as I researched further into it and saw it was used to convey a sense of confident pep I decided against it.

Not at all what I was after with the rat, so for now I just stuck with a basic walk cycle that I could change later.

I had a solid if somewhat stiff start with my first pass. I felt like I wasn’t getting a terrible amount of character through with his walk, he seemed to be walking with a purpose and I wasn’t getting any of his brainless persona. I had a look in the Survival Kit to see what Blair had to say. He mentioned how Art Babbitt would actually have Goofy’s feet turning the opposite way when he walked which was a nice idea but felt far too gloopy and too similar to the rubber hose style of animation that I was actually now trying to avoid repeating in my JAM.

I realised what had interested me about my earlier animation references was how compact and contained the characters body shape and silhouette were, obviously most of them were based on video game characters and had to remain inside a hit box so I didn’t want to copy that style exactly but I did want to keep a certain air of perky tightness with my animation.

But back to my main issue at hand, how to convey more character into the rat’s walk. I didn’t want to do the goofy walk so I deicded to hone in on the rat’s pudgy stomach.

From Blair’s advice I leaned the rat back, which instantly improved his walk.

Before I got any further in my walk animation I realised that since the rat was walking somewhere and was going to be interacting with a button I needed to at least get a rough layout of my background.

I pulled from the Post Human (2013) short for inspiration, it conatined a similar vibe of immoral experimentation in a large testing chamber that I wanted to replicate with my own animation.

I’ve included a screenshot in case you can’t get past YouTube’s age verification. Please excuse the gore.

I had really hated the teleporter design in my storyboard, I’d created it in a rush so I could focus on the storyboarding so when I had the chance I had a look at reference online to make a better one.

The underlying design appeared to be a circle platform with some modules sticking out either to the side or above. I wasn’t looking to break the mold with my own design, I really just needed something to sit behind my animation to give it a sense of space.

I was content enough with what I had here, big open test chamber and a teleporter. I included a load of wires to make the space seem less bare and to draw the viewers attention towards the teleporter platform. With my layout done I searched online for how to bring it into Harmony and create a panning effect. I found this tutorial which mentioned using pegs, the transform tool and keyframes to create a rudimentary pan.

I then imported my BG into Harmony and got this:

Once the BG pan was sorted I could return to my walk animation. I wanted to get a complete cycle of his walk before I added any secondary animations. I was also a bit unsure of how to stop a walk animation once I’d begun it. After speaking to Alec he said all I had to do was have the charcter do a smaller step before coming to a halt.

You can also see above the beginings of an eye blink. I remember being told before to make sure that your character blinks so they look alive and not just a static drawing, I also remember being told to have your characters blink before major movements. I instead choose to do the opposite since my rat had already done all his major movements and was now going to be standing still for the next section of the animation the blink would keep him looking alive and give me another opportunity to convey the rat’s brainlessness. I wanted him to have a slow delayed blink, something which would make him clueless and kinda brain dead. I looked at the goat king in Felix Colgrave’s Double King (2017) for reference. Timestamp: 1.42.

This was then my first pass at the eye blink.

I also attempted my first forey into smear animation with the arm pushing the button. Both looked awful. I wanted the button push to have a certain snappiness to it which didn’t work with the smear and the eye blink was just all wrong. I became interested in a section in Blair’s survival kit which mentions using overlapping forms to give the impression of more movement within an animation.

I decided to try this approach with the button push.

I was a lot happier now with both the button push and the eye blink. The overlap worked to give the me the snappiness I was looking for and I was able to fix the blink by correcting the timing and having the top eye lid come down slightly to meet the bottom eye lid to give a better sense of a blink.

With the start and finish of my walk cycle out of the way I moved onto secondary animations. Before I started on his stomach fat I decided to start by adding bounce to his ears, one becasue it was easier to do and two, the ears could then act as a guide for my timing when I started adding other secondary animations.

I was happy with the ears so moved onto the stomach. I found this gif online which I felt was a great example of a heavy set character walking,.

I noticed however that to replicate the waddle I would have to entirely redo my walk cycle and since I already had a lot more animation still to go I wasn’t keen on setting myself back that far. Instead I had a look again at how Blair had demonstrated using the stomach as a secondary action.

 

Above is my actual second pass and I really didn’t like how it looked. Obviously this is just a rough pass and isn’t synced properly but half way through I knew it wasn’t going to work, there was simply too much movement in the walk. Part of it might be because the stomach animation was too exaggerated but I still felt it just clashed with the ear bounce rather than complimented it. I was also intending to add a bounce onto the tail too so with the stomach included that would be three separate secondary animations on one walk animation. I’d made this overanimation mistake earlier with my walk cycle exercises so I wasn’t keen to repeat the same mistake twice. I decided to scrap the stomach bounce and focus on his ears and tails.

The first pass I did had his tail bouncing from the base which just looked cheap and wrong. I deicided to have a look at Brain from Pinky and the Brain since my rat had a similar tail shape.

I discovered they didn’t really put any movement into his tail. I knew I couldn’t get away with this on my animation so after a brainstorm and a chat with Sarah I decided to have his tail squash and stretch like an accordian as he walks.

This also felt like it was too overly animated and also didn’t really match the movement of his walk. Sarah had suggested I just animate the tip of the tail so I went back and gave that a go.

This version looked a lot better, it had just enough bounce that the tail didn’t look stiff anymore but was subtle enough that it wasn’t over animated.

After I showed my WIP in progress to my co-workers Alec and Daryl they commented that it was strange the rat was willingly opening the portal only for him to be killed by the cat. Originally the story was that he was an expendable lab rat being used by uncaring scientists in a test to see what was on the other side of the portal, of course all of this was backstory and wasn’t going to be explained in the animation. Truthfully I hadn’t put much thought into the narrative since it was only meant to be an animation exercise but I had to consider to how my audience would perceive what I was making.

Alec suggested I could improve the narrative by having the portal teleport in a block of cheese then malfunction and open a portal to the cat as an accident. They also suggested I include a sign in the background instructing the rat to push the button for cheese to give him some more motivation. I took on this feedback and decided to include it in the next stage of my animation.