Month: January 2014

Fishman Manfish Walk Cycle

Video

After the sabotage of the original Fishman Manfish, I could not bear the pain of animating my dearest creation ever again. That all changed however, when I realised how it would make a nice addition to my showreel. So Fishman Manfish is reborn anew!

Yay.

Interview reflection 2

Standard

Over the christmas holidays I decided to take matters into my own hands and animate my own version of our Kane FM interview using Flash, as I had originally intended. I wasn’t all too satisfied having only a model and a set to show for the equivalent of two week’s worth of work, so I went all out and tried my hardest to make (what I believe to be) my most polished and completed animation.

I started out by selecting a voice clip that I thought would be both interesting and manageable  in terms of animation. Then, I went along through-out the duration of my selected clip and drew each of the main key frames for the actions that I wanted my character to move through. I also drew the character’s face and split each separate feature – The eyebrows, left eye, right eye, etc – into individual layers so that they could move around independently and I would have full control over them. With the key poses all planned out, I then began to animate the in-betweens. As I started doing this I realised just how long it would take me to do, so I started planning ways that would cut down on the number of frames I would have to draw without compromising the quality of the animation.

I came up with the idea of cutting away from the character talking as a solution to this. Cutting away to a visual representation of what Haydn was currently talking about not only saved my frame count, but it also kept what was happening on-screen interesting for the audience (I hope). I think that this is one of the reasons why this project was a success.

After animating the three cut-away scenes, I then finished drawing all of the inbetweens. Once I was happy with these, I then went back into each frame and added colour, as well as a bold line around the edge of the character. I’m not entirely sure why I decided to add the bold line – it’s something I do in my drawings in my journal and I really like the style, so I just fancied trying it out and seeing how it worked in an animation. I think it worked really well!

With the body fully animated, all that was left to do was animate the head. I must at admit that by this point in the project however, I was really burnt out and wasn’t 100% focused anymore, as I needed to start planning my current project, ‘Place’. Because of this, there isn’t all too much facial animation actually taking place. I had originally planned to have the head moving around as he was talking, along with the eyes moving and looking around, but I just couldn’t devote much more time to the project. This is the one area where I would say that my film isn’t very strong. The head remains stationary through-out the majority of the animation and the eyes are set to blink roughly once every 4-5 seconds. I did spend some time animating the eyebrows however, as I found them a simple way to add visual emphasis to what my character was saying.

Overall, I’m really happy with the end result. It’s probably the most amount of time I’ve spent on an animation and I think this really shows through.