2D Animation Exercises
In college, I took some classes on animation. Here are two projects I worked on!
Puppet Animation - “Dino Sunset”
This was a culmination of a couple small projects in an Animation class, and I think it came together well enough to feature it on the site.
Part 1 of the project was creating a puppet in Toonboom, complete with patches to hide joints, and replaceable parts (different mouthes, eyes, hands). And then, well, we just did something with it; I went for the classic walk cycle.
Honestly, playing with that puppet was awesome! I was animating so fast! Keyframing motions was very cool, and I'm eager for another opportunity to create and animate a 2D puppet. The biggest issue for me was the joint placement on the legs is a little funky; they're pretty clearly made of separate pieces. So for the next part of the project, I would use grass and other props to cover the legs up.
Anyway, here's an an animation straight from Toonboom:
The class, later that semester, transitioned to After Effects. We were interested in using the 3D camera and space for our animations; we were to give our characters from Toonboom and environment to exist in.
I sketched out my thumbnails, and I went into Photoshop and painted a few props:
These are small thumbnails, but the actual files are very high res. So, in After Effects, I could zoom in and out as much as I want without worrying too much about seeing pixels. And the style was fun, as I was trying to blend in with the vector graphics from Toonboom.
So I took all the props, and made the little cliffside in the final video. I think I could've done the grass different; maybe just paint some "tufts" and use a bunch of those, instead of the big swatches of grass.
The last big improvement was adding the lights in. There's a big spot light (from the "sunset") that helps tie things together.
I hope you like the final product!
Digital Hand-drawn - “Metamorphosis”
This was my first taste of TVPaint! Hooooo boy, I love that program! Up until then my I was animating with either physical media (on paper, or something stop motion) or doing keyframe animation in Maya or Toonboom. So animating frame by frame, but digitally, was pretty sweet.
What was really cool about this project was the premise. Every student was given the same shape, and our film had to begin and end with it. That was a really great jumping off point. And, because the point of the exercise was to just warm up to TVPaint, there wasn't much pressure to make some masterpiece. So it was cool to animate "off the cuff"; there wasn't much preproduction for this, I just jumped right in to the program and started playing.
So I kept it gestural and sketchy, which was fun! I hope you like it!