Animation

This is a plan for my cut out for my dragon frame workshop. I made his hat detachable so that I could have his head opening up and pouring his brains out.

This is a little stop motion gif I made before the Dragon frame workshop so I used a scanner to make this. The issue with the scanner being that I can't see where the pieces were before I moved them but also I kept knocking the pieces around and the static from the scanner caused them to fly out if i opened the lid too zealously 

In my Dragon Frame group we took the session more as a play session just to figure out how all the things worked and get to grips with the programme, so our animation wasn't much related to our project other than we used our motifs. But I really enjoyed it and I'm quite pleased with resulting video. I think that stop motion is something I will pursue further as I found it really rewarding for the work I did and I could straight away see the animation building in front of my eyes.

I decided to try my hand at a hand drawn animation. I planned a simple shot that consisted of individual moving components. I figured I could work off a base drawing and then I'd only have to draw small parts at a time. I did each element on tracing paper and worked towards 25 frames for each movement so that i could make a second worth of animation. I also tried to make my last match up with my first so that i could loop the animation into a gif. For the more complicated parts like the legs and the flippers I only did 13 frames so that I could repeat them back on themselves in reverse order so i could be sure they'd match up again.

Once on photoshop I realised how much time it would take to piece the drawings together into their frames. As expected with repeated tracing there were some inaccuracies and most frames had to be ammended in some way to fit the base drawing. It took me an entire day to put together digitally and make the gif but I'm pretty pleased with the result. Although I wish instead of block lines on the legs i'd made them wiggly instead so that it looks like the legs are swooping forward fast.

When i say wiggly lines i mean like this one i did for PPP last year. The wiggly lines when she flumps over in the sleeping back. I like doing that rather that straight line because it suggests more movement and speed.

One day = One second