I was now entering into the home stretch of my animation. The only areas I had left were:

• Cat grabbing the rat.
• Cat eating rat.
• Cat returning through portal.

This section also gave me a chance to experiment with a bit of smear animation since I’d been curious about implementing since I saw it in Wonderboy. I had a look at some stills from Looney Tunes and Sponegbob for reference.

The timing was a little slow with the first pass but I felt the actual smear itself didn’t look too bad.

I improved the timing so the smear had some actual speed to it. This was my first attempt at doing the grab. There was something stiff and un-natural with it looked currently so I went back and decided to start the movement from his shoulder instead of his elbow.

This looked worse, far, far worse. However I realised I was on the right track, the movement needed to start from his shoulder but it was angle itself that was off. The cat needed to swing his hand out and in for the grab to look more natural.  I was happy with the drawing of the rat being squeezed though so that didn’t change too much.

This looked so much better. I struggled for a good bit with getting the perspective on the arm right, eventually using my own hand as reference. I was happy with it at the time but looking it now the palm could probably curve in a little more at the section near the pinky finger. The smear looked well and I felt there was a nice quickness to the whole movement. I just needed to now clean up the animation and add the rat squeeze.

I was pretty happy with how this turned out, I really like the animation in that final grab. The squeeze is subtle but really helps sell the the feeling of the movement. I was initally concerned about how convincingly it would look with the two characters interacting since I’d never done it before but I’m happy with the final result.

The next stage was the rat being eaten and the cat being sucked back into the portal. I followed the original storyboard closely for these last two sections since it was pretty close to how I wanted the final animation to look, it just needed a little tweaking.

I liked the staging and anticipation of this first pass but felt the actual eating movement felt too fast. I decided to go back an add some ease in, ease out and a smear so I could get more ‘time’ out of the movement.

This looked a lot better. However in hindsight now I feel the change between the jaw open and the cheeks full is too extreme and could have benefited from an additional drawing before the full cheeks just to ease the animation in a little smoother.

The last step was sucking the cat back through the portal. I was happy with the drawings I had used for this section in my storyboard so I simply copied them for my key poses and added a few inbetweens.

I’m happy with the poses in this section but now I’m not sure about the timing, there maybe needs to be better anticipation to set the animation up more. Now it feels like it goes by just a bit too fast. However at the time I felt it would serve it’s purpose and I still needed to do all my blog work for the jam so I didn’t sweat the specifics.

Above is the finished uncoloured version of my JAM. Even though I hadn’t intended to colour the piece I realised I’d managed my time enough that I could get some colour in.

I liked how the colour looked, it certainly helped seperate the animation out from the background. I also had a go of working up the background into a more finished version.

I really didn’t like how the background looked once the two were put together. In fact I prefer the version of the animation with the rough background. I did the background in a bit of burnout just after finishing the animation and rushed through it. The line width needs admended, especially around the teleporter, it’s just too thick. The cables behind the cat are also extremely distracting and impede the clarity of the animations. Rather than complimenting the animation the background actively distracts from it, it’s a shambles. I’m not too surprised though, from the begining the background was always done as an after thought, the animation was my main focus but now it’s interfering with the final product.

So I’m going to scrap the background and submit the coloured animation with the rough background as my final piece. The background isn’t needed and is more a mess than a help.

UPDATE: Because I’m stubborn I took one last stab at the BG. I thinned the lines, added some foreground elements and changed the colour ro green. It was slightly rushed but it’s a definite improvement. I still think I’ll be submitting my BG-less animation as my final though.