For this project I was assigned to make my own 8 – 12 second animation and use audio to make my character’s act and emote. Since I’m trying to focus on doing 2D animation I chose to do this in 2D.
Style:
When first starting off to create my character’s I wanted to take some inspiration from one of the studios I was already currently studying, that being Studio Meala, their style incorporates a lot of soft round shapes and I wanted to take heed of that while I was drawing, in addition to that I also took a but of inspiration from shows and series such as “Adenture time” and “Bee and Puppycat”.
For this project I was set back quite a bit due to illness so I knew I wouldn’t be able to make anything with complex looking character’s and so I began to mimic those series because they have both simple but very effective styles that have appeal and would allow for animators to animate much more quickly compared to a series such as Avatar the Last Airbender or Helluvaboss.
Reference:
When it came to referencing I did some research into different shot compositions in order to help me make an animation that wasn’t just dead flat looking at the character the whole time standing in one place, and so I found a cheat sheet online that I used as a reference for my shots. In addition to that I also looked into different animations online to see how they composed their shorts and study how many cuts they went though in a 10 second span.
Stadomyre was a great reference for this, he’s an Animator who had a few shot clips already up on his YouTube which I skimmed though plenty of times.
Now as for pose and action references there wasn’t very many poses or actions that I could find online I needed for my animation and so I went and filmed a few of my own.
The first clip I wanted to get access the expression that this is dead set what the character thinks and nothing else is up for debate and so he crosses his arms quickly and violently.
Next was just an arm pumping motion to see what the poses would look like when someone is chanting by themselves.
Conclusion:
Overall for the amount of time I had on the project I feel satisfied enough with the outcome. I really feel like I could have done more however, I would have loved to sit down and have characters move their shoulders and hips as the moved their body maybe add in some secondary motion in some places, again however, the time constraints didn’t let me do that. I not too happy with the line quality either, I might go back and properly do the line-art of the animation if I find some time later on, in addition I’d like to practice my lip syncing too, I hadn’t really done much lip sync before this but I now know it’s a skill I really got to practice some more.