Animation for the Creative Industries, Assignment 2 – Animation Development Project

For our second assignment for this class, we were asked to animate 8-11 seconds in either 2D or 3D based on an audio we were to animate to.

I chose to animate in 2D as I am far more comfortable animating in hand drawn 2D than I am with animating in 3D.

I had originally picked an audio from the 11 seconds club website but when I remembered a line from Hayloft 2 by Mother Mother, I thought it would be far more fun to animate as I thought I could build a more interesting storyline around it.

Storyboards:

Once I had decided on my audio, I made storyboards to get down my rough idea for the animation.

These were the original storyboards before I got some feedback on them from Alec.

This version was after feedback. I changed the third and fourth storyboards so that you saw the characters full body and expression instead of just a closeup of a leg. I think it looked better after the alterations that Alec had suggested. The storyboards were also a good reference themselves to look back on as I was animating.

Reference:

Once the storyboards were done, I went looking for an animation reference to help me with the axe swing at the end of the animation and ended up finding one in a scene from Family Guy.

Once I found the video, I scrubbed through it so I could screenshot each frame to get a better idea of the movement.

Having this breakdown of the animation movement helped with making sure my axe swing looked believable. It was also the only reference I could find that was close to the sort of movement I was hoping to animate for that final scene.

Rough/sketch pass:

As I was doing each scene of my animation, I always checked that it matched up to the audio/lyrics before I started to line and colour the scene to finish it.

Only once I was happy that the animation I sketched matched up well to the audio, did I start the process of lining and colouring each scene to complete it. I made alterations to the scenes as I went in order to make sure the animation and audio lined up to my liking.

Final animation:

Once each scene was finished, I simply swapped out the sketched version for the coloured finished version in my After Effects file. I think the animation looks much better coloured than sketched and I think it lines up to the audio pretty well.

As I am not great at backgrounds, I kept them plain block colours for the most part. The only scene that got a proper ish background was the full body scene where the character is showing off her two different colour legs. This is because I felt that scene would be able to give more context to where the animation was taking place and give an insight to what the character was doing.

In that scene, after some feedback, I added little splashes of blood at her feet as she stepped down as it gave more personality to the scene and it also made sense that the pools of blood she was standing in would splash as she stepped in them.

Reflection:

Once I had found an audio I was actually excited to animate to, this assignment became pretty enjoyable and I actually looked forward to working on it. I was also glad to have an opportunity to work in 2D again, since the majority of our assignments tend to be in 3D, as I feel I’m much better at animating in 2D than I am in 3D plus 2D is sort of my comfort zone when it comes to animating as I don’t feel I’m all that good at 3D animation.

I also enjoyed being given the opportunity to work on my own for this assignment as, personally, all the group assignments have been wearing me down. There was always someone not communicating enough or at all in the group projects which made what should’ve been a fun project/assignment frustrating instead. It was nice being able to work on my own and not need to rely on anyone else to pull their weight.

If I was to redo this assignment, I think I would maybe try to push myself out of my comfort zone a little more and try and animate scenes that fluidly moved into each other instead of using so many jump cuts between scenes. I think it would make my animations look more smooth and possibly nicer to watch. I would also maybe try my hand at actual lip-syncing to the audio as well instead of just giving a sort of visual aid to the lyrics. That would definitely be outside my comfort zone as I’ve never tried animating lip-syncing before.

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