After taking on the feedback from Alec and Daryl I broke down the new elements I would need to animate:

• Cheese teleporting.
• Rat cheese reaction.
• Teleport malfunction.
• Rat react.

Since I would have electrical sparks for the teleporting and malfunction animation I was going to have do some research  into animating 2D lightning and explosion SFX. The Etherington Brother’s do a great series on how to think when your drawing and they had a post on their blog about lightning which I found incredibly helpful.

I followed a lot of these pointers when I was drawing my electrical effects, espeically the section about using squared off zig-zags do define the shape of my lightning and the section about drawing a guide when you create arcs. Since I had a good idea now on how to draw eletrical SFX I needed to figure out how to move it.

I found a page on the Sun & Moon studio site which included a fantastic guide to animating different kinds of lightning. I used a combination of their strike and pulasting examples to help guide me.

A tip on their page which I found really helpful was using a wave cycle during your eletrical arcs to give a sense the energy was traveling down the arc from point to point.

Another site I found was Flash FX Animation. While their page mostly focused on actual lightning bolts I found their break down of the lightning strike really useful, and his timeline breakdown helped me realise I needed to animate my SFX on ones to keep it organic and alive.

Unfortunately my finish export of the eletrical SFX didn’t have a BG set behind it for the full length of the animation so towards the end the BG suddenly cuts to black and we’re left with this:

Fortunately apart from the height of which the cheese originally appeared the eletrical SFX didn’t go through any changes so was able to re-export the SFX using my more recent animation file.

Once I had my cheese into done I moved onto the rats reaction. My original attempts of the reaction also lost their BG halfway so it’s impossible to make out what they looked like. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as they looked absolutely terrible but I’ve decided to include one of the broken gifs as evidence.

You can’t really make it out but the rat blinks and opens it’s jaw drops in surprise. The timing for this was awful and the expression was awful. In hindisght this was likely because this section wasn’t part of my original storyboard and I didn’t design any expressions for it. Truthfully I should have taken the time out and experimented with some variations, instead of trying to push on through to the animation. Even just some sketches in a notebook would have made a difference but I had a lot more to animate and didn’t feel like losing the momentum I had picked up with the animation process. This is a mistake I won’t make again.

I decided to scrap the shock expression and go instead with a look of beguiled wonder. Since I had previously been visiting the Spongebob cartoon for earlier reference I choose to keep the style consistent and return to the show for my facial reference. I struggled for a long time getting the timing on the mouth right and looked at a couple of Sponegbob clips before finding the one blow; timetsape 5.40:

Once I had reference for his mouth I searched for reference I could use of his pupils dilating, I finally came across this clip from Adventure Time (2010) which I used a guide for my timing.

At the time of animating this I was content with the reaction and moved on, however looking at it now I see so many issues. I watched the Spongebob clip without sound and it’s only in hindsight now that I realised he isn’t actually mouthing ‘Woah’ but ‘super’ which might explain why the mouth movement looks so off on the rat, I also tried to copy the timing by watching the clip back frame by frame but I failed to watch it in realtime which I think is why the mouth timing seems strange. I did play around with the timing before settling on the current speed but I think now it still needs more tweaking.

The same can be said of the pupil dilate, there’s just something about it that feels so stiff and uniform. Now if I had the time I’d like to go back and take another stab at the rat’s reaction but at the time of animating it I was happy enough to move another the next section, which was the teleporter malfunctioning.

I returned to the reference I had gathered earlier for eletrical SFX and found some new reference for creating an explosion.

I also had a look at real mushroom cloud explosions but I eneded up not really using much real life reference since actual mushroom clouds move at a far difference pace due to the size of them. I did however use it to give me an idea of where the cloud tapers.

I was happy with the final outcome for the malfunction animation. The eletric is just three frames planned in reverse on ones. I like the little mushroom cloud explosion and how the cheese wobbles then breaks apart, howver I think it’s kinda hard to notice the explosion, it sort of disappears in the background and the viewers attention is fighting between it and the cheese but since it works to set up the cheese dissipating maybe it’s fine. Not all animations need to be the center of attention.

With the malfunction done the next step was the cat’s intro. This section I had a far clearer image in my head of how I wanted everything to move so creating it was actually a very straight foward process. I really wanted to capture that sense of a larger mass squeezing through a small enterance. I wanted the audience to feel the movement. This was tricky since I was trying to convey to the audience there was a lot of mass behind the portal without actually being able to show them. I had a look at reference from the Winnie the Pooh show (1988) and an latin american show called Pumpkinpuss and Mushmouse (1964).

The Winnie the Pooh clip turned out being the most help for timing and giving me an idea for how to work the mass. I ended up working the cat’s squeeze into two parts. The first part with his eye and the second being the cat’s face itself.

I’m mostly happy with how this turned out but I’m not quite sure about some parts. I really like the section with the eye, there’s a great sense of movement there but it sadly isn’t really carried over into the section with the cat, part of this I feel is down to the planning on the animation. To get a better sense of the cats face being squeezed through the hole the force of the movement should be coming from the centre of his face not his eye, I also think I would have benefitted from exagerating the final push more then have the cat bounce back into his neutral position.

The next stage was the rat’s screaming reaction to the cat. I had planned and prepared for this section as well so it was also pretty straight forward to work with. I still hadn’t quiet figured out yet how to animation so this process was mostly experimentation. I had a look at screaming reference from Courage the Cowardly Dog (1996) and some more Sponegbob.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0Z8ZPcuGeU&ab_channel=GFHype

The main area of movement I took away from these references was the mouth and tongue.

My first pass I thought was fine, but I wasn’t too sure about how the jaw moved. I decided in my next attempt to scale back the animation some more and just have his tongue move.

I liked how this looked, it gave more of an impression that there was a scream originality from inside his throat. However I felt like maybe I was pulling my punches here and could do more to sell the impression of the rat being afraid. I had another look at my reference and saw that they mostly featured the character ‘vibrating’ as they scream so I decided to stop being lazy and commit, which lead to this.

I was a lot more happy with this version, although watching the isolated animation now I still think I could have done a little bit more to make the shudder seem more alive, adding some bounce in the tail and ears I think would have been a nice touch. But as an end result it served it’s purpose in the grander scale of things.