Practice Animation - Butterfly Dragon Flying (Take 2)

After creating my flying animation for the BumbleFox character, I decided to do an updated version of the flaying animation for the Butterfly Dragon. This was inspired by how much better my other animation looked after I put a bit more motion into it. 

I re-drew out the character, in the same way I had done before, except this time I did not include the tail.

I animated both the wings and tail on separate video layers, and this time put more care into the line work and spent more time making sure the transitions were smooth.

I am very pleased with how this turned out, I think it's a massive improvement from the one I had created previously.

Practice Animation - Butterfly Dragon Counting

To further play around with my idea of creating an animation of the Butterfly Dragon teaching to count in a short animation, I started working on a small tester animation showing counting using numbers of fruit. 

These frames were stills with animations of the numbers appearing above the fruit, with a small animation of the dragon appearing at the end. Not a very adventurous start, but something to get the ball rolling. The fruits being counted are 1 Apple, 2 Watermelon slices, 3 Bananas, 4 Oranges and 5 Pears, with the pile at the end consisting of just a random number of each fruit.

The final frame has the little dragon popping out of the pile, it's a very cute end to the animation.

I feel like this animation is a step in the right direction. Although not much really happens, I feel like the character looks really good in this style and lends itself to this kind of animation. I will continue to experiment with different ways of animating sequences similar to this.

Practice Animation - BumbleFox Character Flying

After creating my flying animation for the Butterfly Dragon, I decided to give it a go with the little fox character that I created. I imported the scan of my sketch into Adobe Photoshop and traced over it with the paintbrush tool. For this experiment, I chose not to use colour.

The first step was to get my outline completed.

I then copied and pasted the outline onto 4 frames, moving it upwards slightly each time. The wings were then added on an animation layer to give the flying effect.

I then imported my video into Adobe AfterEffects to loop the flying animation.

This is the end result after being exported from Adobe AfterEffects

After exporting my first version, I decided to go back to my animation in Adobe Photoshop and make a few adjustments. This involved removing the tail and eyes from a few of my static frames in order to animate them, to make the character's flying motion seem more realistic.

I feel like the animation is a lot more successful with the addition of the extra movement and I am very pleased with how it has turned out.

Practice Animation - First Flight

Today I thought I'd test out an animation of the little Butterfly Dragon flying. Nothing too ambitious at this stage, just a short looped animation of the butterfly dragon flying in place. This would be an animation to test the movements of the wings, as they are pretty complex in design.

I started out by drawing the body of the Butterfly Dragon and moving it into different movie frames, with the body moving up a little each time, and then down. I then drew the wings on in a separate movie layer.

To make both wings the same on each side, I duplicated them using the select and alt key, and then moving it over to the other side of the body, and then transform to flip it horizontally. I did this for each position of the wings to make sure they were the same each time.

Introduction to Animation 2 - Combining Animations

Today I had my second animation workshop in the studio, this time with Gabrielle. She gave us each a brief to work in groups of 3 and create a looped animation based on one of the movie extracts she'd prepared. She showed us a few examples of moving google logos and said that we should aim to create a group of moving characters.

Me, Rema and Samantha chose the Zoo script and decided to each draw an animal which is brown/orange/white in colour to ensure that the animals were harmonious in colour. I animated a tiger, Rema made a porcupine and Samantha an anteater. We worked individually on Adobe Photoshop to create 3 separate animated images.

I began by drawing out my sleeping tiger using a thin brush with 50% opacity.

I then added a background layer of colour to the tiger.

For an added effect, I added a butterfly, which flutters down and lands on the tiger's back.

The animation ended up being a bit more complex than I had planned. The body of the tiger remains still, but a few seconds in to the animation I switched to a still frame of the tiger without eyes or a tail, to allow me to animate these. Keeping my colour opacity at 100% I was then able to add a colour layer behind the tail to make it seem as if it moves over the body.

The next stage was to import all of the animals onto one computer and combine them in Adobe After Effects. My tiger formed the background as I had drawn it on a white layer, whereas the others had animated on a layer separate to the background. We then imported the animals as quicktime movies and placed them around the tiger.

We could not figure out how to loop the playback, so we instead copied and pasted the animals multiple times to make their movement repeat.

Our final composition had all the animals in various sizes surrounding the tiger. For this animation, I removed the butterfly for fear that it would not fit the size of the frame.

Here is our final animation. We were all very pleased with how the animals all move at different speeds, we all felt that they complement each other well.

Design Ideas - Sketches and a Possible Character

Although I like the idea of re-using a character which I have previously developed, I thought I'd play around with designs for another character. I like the idea of combining bugs with other animals, hence the Butterfly Dragon, which is a tiny dragon with butterfly features. 

I created a page of ideas, just drawing random bugs and creatures and letting my ideas flow.

Out of all of the designs, I really liked the Fox-like character at the bottom of the page.

I imported my scan into photoshop and began creating a digital drawing of the character. I used a 50% opacity thin black brush to create a subtle outline.

I thought the character would look nice with a floral garland, so I used a circle in a different layer to create this.

Here is my final character design. I am very happy with how it turned out. I may experiment more with both this and the Butterfly Dragon before I commit to which one I will use for my final animation

New Animation Idea - Butterfly Dragon

Today I had a new idea for a possible animation that could even form the basis of my final animation. I got this idea when thinking over what Paul said about using existing characters, and I began to think about the possibility of using one of my existing children's book characters for this animation.

The character that I am thinking of using is The Butterfly Dragon. This character has a fondness for fruit, specifically pears. I had an idea involving teaching children to count, using this character counting fruit perhaps. I may have a play around with animating this character before I make the decision.

Animation Timing Test - Shape of You

Today I started working on a new little animated video using the software that I learned to use earlier this week. I played around a lot more with timings in this animated short as this is what Paul suggested I try out.

I planned out this animation before I made it. I had an idea of what I was going to make before I began.

I used the song 'Shape of You' by Ed Sheeran for this animation as this is a song I like and feel that I could animate to the beat of. My idea for this animation involved a lot of movements to the beat of the track which is quite fast, so I found it a little difficult to perfect the timings, so I feel like I did a good job.

The first phase of the animation has fireworks exploding to the beat.

The second phase has drinks filling up and going down to the beat, with the background lighting also changing colour.

The third phase has the dots moving up and down to the beat.

The final transition is a large heart that covers the screen,.

The final phase has little diamonds appearing and disappearing to the beat.

When I came to render the video, I realised how heavily my animation relied on the onion skins that were present during the development, and as a result the rendered video looked rather jumpy. To resolve this issue, I used screen capture to record my video in editing and then created the final version on Adobe Premier, and I am very happy with the outcome.

Introduction to Animation - Fireworks

Today I began the animation unit with a workshop with Paul. He taught us how to do frame by frame animation using Adobe Photoshop. This animation technique involved drawing each frame and creating a 10fps video using them.

He taught us various different features that photoshop has that make it easy to make animations using the program, such as still frames and onion skins.

I started out creating an animation of a dog sitting, but very quickly got fed up with this and started trying out a different animation, involving fireworks. For my first animation on this program I am pretty pleased with it.

After showing Paul, he suggested that I work with timings in my animations, and that will be what I try next.