2D Animation

At first, the walk cycle task made me a little nervous because I didn't think I was going to have the skills to do it. After sitting down, taking a deep breath, and plugging in my tablet, I got to work. I watched a lot of tutorials online and from class, then I was able to get the gist of it. It was important to find a rhythm and animate on 3s. Doing everything in its own layer also helped. I began with red and blue lines for the front and back legs, as well as the arms. When the spine and body were done, I outlined the legs and arms and added hands and feet. I did the neck and head last, which was thanks to being able to copy and paste the actual head and rotating it to go along with the rest of the body. The walk seems a bit bouncy, and it only takes two steps, but it's still walking somewhere.   

I decided to name the guy moving the box Harold, and by the looks of it, the box is light to him. I misinterpreted the directions and didn't exactly add weight, but the weight of the box should be obvious by how easily he is able to pick it up. Although I wish I had made it heavier, it was still a lot of work to put this together. I started by taking a reference video of myself lifting up a square shaped ottoman in my room. After that, I wanted a string bean looking character so I did a couple rough sketches of what that would look like. Then, I went in and did the key poses, then doing in betweens to make the movement more smooth. And voila, harold and his weightless box were born.   

This here is Fjord performing a set of actions- he's rather athletic. I relied heavily on the reference sheet I made, but I struggled with how I was going to get him to perform all his tasks. At first I was going to give him a friend who was throwing things at him, but I thought it would be cooler if he could do everything himself (it also saved animation time). Having the balls being tossed at him by some unknown entity was the story, but it was find doing inbetweens to get him from one pose to the next. I wish I had done a better job on the line work and volume, and maybe spent more time on the inbetweens, but he does perform every action from his character sheet.

  This little fella does it all- kicks, throws, panics, etc. He does get a little aggressive for someone who is filled to the brim with powder though. The process of bringing him to life was pretty interesting. It was simple in the sense to position him doing various tasks, but at the same time complicated because he has no face and the motion had to be shown through his body movement. I like that his little flour nubs could be used as arms and legs, even bending him over slightly could convey an emotion. For the next part of this assignment, animating him, I hope to incorporate all these motions or even give him a friend possibly. I'm not sure if I'll go down the stripping or murder route though, haha. 

There wasn't really a creative process for this video, I just tried to follow the instructions. I did my best to have the ball swinging from the left side of the screen to the left, and then create a pendulum effect with the ball overlapping and swinging side to side at the end. The goal was to make it as if the platform was swinging the ball, and then it did the followthrough action at the very end. It's a bit choppy for my standards, but this is my final product. 

Creating a bouncing ball was a fun task. I was inspired by the diner I used to work at that had a gumball machine in the corner and a table with a plant next to it. During my first draft, I focused on getting the arches right and making sure the ball had the appropriate speed to make it look like it was actually bouncing. There were two issues though: the ball's volume wasn't consistent and the physics didn't make too much sense. I had the ball bouncing off the gumball machine right to the table, which was too big of an unnatural jump. On top of that, the plant also was freehand so it didn't have consistency either. I went back and did some editing though, and redid the arcs so they were almost a template for how big the ball should be. For the physics, I added some extra bounces before it landed on the table.  I also used the pivot tool to help with the plant, and decided to have it drop on the floor instead of just falling over. After copying and pasting each plant ou