Rough Animation Progress

(Week 1 of animating – Week 2)

I’ve begun rough animation progress on the first half. I’m trying to go scene by scene, but I have a feeling this will slow me down the further I go into the animation. I think I’ll need to change Sylvie and Priya’s design slightly to make it easier to animate, and so I think I’ll need to complete more finished character sheets and expression sheets to make the process easier.

green screen transition animated fire – YouTube

I used this video as reference for the fire transition, which helped me a lot. Finding a reference from life was difficult, and so I had to use an animated reference. It was actually really helpful in putting together a convincing transition and I think it turned out well.

HOW TO ANIMATE FIRE 🔥🔥🔥 – Bing video

I also used these two as further reference just so I could have a better understanding of fire and how to capture it’s movement.

My flame animation could use a little work, but it won’t be a priority for now, if I have time I’ll go back and fix it.

Changes and The Reason For It

(Spoiler, it’s over-ambition and inexperience)

As can be seen, I had to make changes to the animation already. While roughing out the walk cycle for Sylvie it struck me that I was being overly ambitious. I got about six frames into the beginning of the cycle, and decided promptly that there was very little chance I would get it and a second character walk cycle done to a standard I was happy with in the time I was given.

There are obviously problems with this rough, but I was quite proud of the progress I was making, it was simply taking me too long. This is where my inexperience comes into play, and the earlier concerns caught up. Walk cycles can be very tricky, and there was too much to take into consideration for me to keep track of while roughing this out. If I had more time, I’d dedicate it to creating a dynamic walk cycle. I’d experiment with secondary action and inputting personality into the character’s walk, alas, I do not have the time. My inexperience influenced me to underestimate the work it would take to complete.

The other reason, and by extension the other problem with including two character walk cycles, was that I am a perfectionist. I was setting high expectations for myself, and part way through animating this I realised it was unrealistic and potentially stressing me out. The amount of detail I wanted to include was burdensome, but simplifying it down would create a situation where I wouldn’t be happy with the outcome due to feeling like it was subpar. I want this animation to be of good quality, even if this is my first whole project, and simplifying them would make me feel like I hadn’t tried hard enough.

So, I made the decision to cut them entirely and mix a few of the scenes together to create a shorter animation that I could put more focus into.

 

At the end of the week, I finished adding colour to the scenes I’d cleaned up.