Floursack Animation

I did this floursack animation to practice movement, and I think it was very successful. I continuously tweaked it, and I already have ideas of how to improve it for next time.

I animated on Clip Studio Pro Ex on 24 frames.

This was the key frames and a little bit of tweening.

First pass, inbetweens, breakdowns and keyframes done. I noticed a snapping issue on the flour sack’s fall, while it doesn’t look bad, I wanted fix it to see what it would look like.

And this is the final rough animation. I think this was a really helpful task to do, and I enjoyed the process of animating it! I think I need to work more on secondary action, as I struggled to make it look natural, but it is a start.

 

Puddle Cat

We were given the task to create something from a simple shape using the straight ahead method of animating. I started with a circle and slowly melted it out, I didn’t really have any idea of what to turn it into. but at some point during the process I saw a blob that looked like cat ears, and it gave me the idea to create Puddle Cat!

I have to admit, I’m just a little emotionally attached for it being a class exercise. I tried to add a little bit of dynamic action with the tail, but I think I could’ve refined it more.

Storyboards

I did the class exercise which was to draw a floursack character for these storyboard narrations. I don’t think these are particularly interesting looking, I wish I had a bit more time to refine them a little, however this was an informative task. I now have a better idea of what I need to improve, which is primarily staging.

Magical Academia Storyboards

Due to an indecision on the transition between me and Sam I had two openings. However part way through drawing the first pass, we decided the flame to torch transition works better and so I developed them into storyboard thumbnails to completion.

The discarded opening was a spider scuttling out from under the door, transitioning to my characters outside a mysterious door in the forest. They open it with a spell and go in. It was a pretty boring and limited opening that would’ve padded out the main concept of my segment, which is them in the catacombs.The storyboards for my segment follow Sylvie and her friend as they traverse the catacombs under the school, and they make a surprising discovery. It transitions from behind a pillar of stone to Ciara’s spooky forest segment. I wanted to create something that has a mix of limited and dynamic animation, and also demonstrates the principles clearly. I won’t know if it properly translates until I see it in motion, but I am hopeful that it works well!

Final Storyboards

These are the final storyboards. They don’t have backgrounds but I wanted to put a focus on the character movement and how each scene connects. I also added additional notes to help frame the animation during the process and make it easier on myself.

For my final group, I’ve chosen to go back to Magical Academia. I loved the idea and was attached to the world we’d created, so I reunited with Ciara, Caity and Samantha. We also gained two new members, Milo and Stork, and this has meant we can display more of our world. Everyone seems really enthusiastic, despite Stork being really sick.

The brainstorming

We began organising the timeline for the animation, and who was going where. We figured out the animation, if our segments are 15 seconds each, would be 1.30 mins. That’s not a lot of time, and since there’s 6 of us we decided a montage style animation would be better than a narrative driven one. Our fear was that it wouldn’t showcase the world we put so much effort into creating.

So, we got a bunch of locations, noted down ideas and ended up with this line-up

Caity and Me – opening shot of the school

Stork – Canteen

Milo – potions class

Caity – Library

Samantha – Dorms

Me – Catacombs

Ciara – Spooky Forest

With this is mind, we begun storyboarding and concepting for characters.

Character Concepting

I started with a bunch of loose sketches just to get down ideas. I drew a pixie girl, but decided she didn’t quite fit with the cast of characters my team were creating. So I drew up a couple of more sketches.

Taking into consideration that the rest of my group were creating anthropomorphic characters, I chose to develop the fox sketch into a full character. Trying out a variety of outfits, hats, colours and experimenting with how these things influence the type of personality that comes across.

7 + 8 were the most successful first passes. I got the opinion of the rest of my group members, and they were in agreement that I should develop those two specifically. So, I did a further three character designs.I liked how 3 looked, and after receiving more feedback, I went on to create a further 3 designs, and created these. I have decided the first colour pass is the most successful.

Final Sylvie Design

I made a very rough sheet to keep things consistent in the animation. It didn’t change from the final sketch very much. I tried some expressions without her hat to get a sense of her proportions underneath it.

 

I then got inspired by the pumpkin head photoshoots that were circling online over Halloween, so I drew another character for Sylvie to interact with. Design board

The Final Design

Priya’s character sheet changed the most. I decided the eyelashes interfered with the emotions and expressiveness of her face, so removed them. I also simplified her lights down to make it easier for me to animate. I think I could’ve explored her character a bit further, but I’m happy with her final design.

Bouncing Ball Exercise

All three together

The ‘common’ rubber ball

Ping pong ball

Bowling ball

 

Timing Exercise

Animated on 1’s

Animated on 2’s

 

Animated on 3’s

Class timing exercises

Thoughts and notes

These tasks were fairly simple, but very informative and I now have a better understanding of timing and spacing in animation. The class exercises in particular dealt solely with timing, which highlighted how important squash and stretch is, as the ball following the curved line in particular looks very stiff. I personally thought these tasks helped further my understanding of the importance of timing, and I will be taking it into heavier consideration for future animation tasks.

Bowling Ball Bounce Animation Reference – YouTube

Animation Reference: Bouncing ball – ping pong – YouTube

 

Lecture Exercise

We received a guest lecture from Sorcha, an animator who works in the industry.  She taught us about character design and how to make a more effective character in the concepting process. It was a super informative lesson and she got us to apply some of that knowledge in a super short exercise where we used shape to create a character.

I really stepped out of my comfort zone for this exercise because I used styles I don’t usually do. It helped me become more comfort to twist anatomy and push boundaries to create more interesting looking characters. That being said, I think I could’ve pushed a lot of these further to be more visually diverse and wacky.

 

 

Sugar Prohibition Character Designs

I was very uninspired for the Sugar Prohibition world, so I struggled to come up with original and interesting designs. I drew a couple of designs for Mo Lars, our detective protagonist. The idea was to have him on the younger side, so he’s slightly more naïve and easier manipulated by the femme fatale character. These are very generic, as I said I was uninspired and mostly just building from reference (1  and 2 specifically) so I could rework his character later.

Next was Sugar Kane, I actually did her first so I could experiment more with styles before diving further into a design. I did six in total, and I feel like these have more variety and interest than the detective concepts. I pulled reference from Marilyn Monroe and general celebrity fashions of the time because Sugar Kane is a jazz singer. I wanted her to have a sultry, slightly sharp but unassuming appearance as she is an informant for the police, but also is really the main antagonist of the animation. She’s the actual mob boss.

This was all the work I got done for this world, and I was happy to shift groups to a world that is more suited to my tastes. If I were to do this again, I’d redo these concepts to push the shapes further to make the characters more visually interesting.