For the main characters within our film, the character designs we are going for are designed by A. Tinsley.
I really like how the fish monster’s design looks as it has similar shapes to my axolotl design and would be easy for me to animate. The added hair can help with it expressing it’s emotions with it’s fins. I may struggle with the humans design as he has a distinct head shape that I’ve never animated with before but I’m willing to accept the challenge.
This is the story we’re going for. My part will be the boy swimming above the water surface and then the fish monster gives him a helmet that he’ll then put on.
I done my sketchy storyboard within Krita as I like how the brushes look within it.
The poses and motions within my storyboard look quick simple, so I hope to make up for this by adding secondary motion to the characters such as their hair blowing in the wind and them slightly bobbing in the water which will also be slightly moving.
Sketchy storyboard timed
Timing the storyboard will make it easier to make my animatic.
For my animatic and animation, I’ll be using Adobe Animate, as I’ve used it to animate before and am more familiar and comfortable in doing so. For my line-art within the film, I’ll be using the vector tool within Adobe Animate as it’s very clean and easy to use.
Videos I watched which helped while I was working on this.
Gave simple tips, such as timing is more important than overly ‘smooth’ animation. Gave emphasise on recoil, overshoot and anticipation while giving examples making it easy to follow within my own animation. Examples of poor animation and how to fix it, such as showing the importance of keyframes and timing which helped me make sure not to make the same mistakes.
I’m not the best at line-art so I watched this video which gave some decent tips which I followed. Keep line art in mind while sketching, erase messiness of line-art to make a more clear line to follow which I did for while making my animatic.
A video that goes into great detail about the principles of animation and gives animated examples of all of them which helps me understand them better.