Animation - Butterfly Dragon book opening

Today I decided to give myself a larger animation to complete. I have decided to theme my project around 'characters', so what better than to animate the beginning of my own original story 'The Butterfly Dragon and the Pear Tree'. The beginning of this book involves a lot of movement and sets the scene, so I thought it'd be a nice part to begin with.

The pages I used for my animation are:

The first page

The second page

And the first frame on the 3rd page!

 I really enjoyed making this animation. It consisted of 3 parts; The scene setting, the reveal of the dragon and the close up. This complex animation took me an entire day to complete, despite being 9 seconds long, due to the complexity of the colours and detail.

This was a fun animation to make, it was lovely seeing my story which I wrote 2 years ago come to life.

Research - Disney Animated Shorts

Feast is a 2014 animated short film produced by Walt Disney Studios, about a Boston Terrier who loves junk food. 

It was animated using the Meander system developed for another Disney short; Paperman, and was the first time the tool was used in colour.

The characters and environment feature a line-free style with solid blocks of colour. The view centres on Winston and the food while leaving the human characters generally out of focus. Because the film consists of a series of very brief scenes cut together, the foods portrayed had to be appetising and recognisable at first glance.

I really love this animation, everything from the style, to the characters and the plot. I find it really inspiring how we are able to connect so well to the character and develop an attachment in such a short animation, and this is something I hope to create in my animation as well.

Here is a short video showing The Making of Feast and some images that show how the character was developed.

Animation - Counting Intro

Today I set myself the goal of creating a short intro for what could be a counting animation for young children. I wasn't feeling particularly ambitious, and just wanted to create something simple that would show how the character animates, yet this turned into my most complex animation yet.

This animation consisted on a number of still and movie frames, and changed between these to allow movement of the character. Additional frames were included for colour.

This animation was aimed to be a short introduction that would provide a transition into the counting animations, it involves the text appearing followed by the character, but as I worked on this I began to add more features and movements.

The transition out of the intro still involves the dragon covering the screen with a burst of red fire. This was something I decided to add at the very end of the animating process and I'm very happy with it.

I think this animation is a step in the right direction and I'm getting the hang of utilising frames and colours.

Research - Kévin Gemin

An animator who really inspires me is Kévin Gemin, a French animator who is fascinated by birds and the way that they move. Gemin approaches animation in a very interesting way, using very basic software on his Nintendo 3DS, as well as TVpaint every now and then. I found Gemin's work by chance while browsing Facebook, and I have come to admire his very quirky and unique style.

Kévin Gemin uses photos from the internet to inspire the little animations he creates and the characters that he comes up with. He then animates using FlipNote Studio on the Nintendo 3DS, which is a program I have used briefly but found very difficult to use, due to the size of the screen.

This French animator also animates to music, with his characters moving perfectly in time with the beat to the selected track. Here are a few of my favourite animations that he has created with music.

Kévin Gemin mainly uses FlipNote Studio on his Nintendo 3DS to create his animations, however more recently he has been using a program called TVpaint. 

I'm thinking if I were to do animations that involve dancing characters or a lot of movement, I'd be better creating characters that are simpler in design and are not complex, to make it easier to animate their movements.

Practice Animation - Flying Characters Together

On Adobe AfterEffects I imported both of my recent flying animations in order to combine them and have my two characters flying side by side. I used my knowledge of AfterEffects from my workshop to help me with this.

I imported the videos of both characters into the program.

I put both of the characters on loop and exported the video.

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.