Sams illustrations: First project Reflection

Semester 1

NCI443 Principles of Animation

For this project I was asked to research the history of animation and how to animate a walk cycle.

For my first task I looked up on the origins of the moving image having been developed in the early 19^th century in the form of Phenakistoscope, a Zoetrope and a zoopraxiscope that was originally made by the renowned English photographer Edward Muybridge who was best known for his work in the beginnings of locomotion with humans and animals. Before I began the walk cycle I produced three small animation sequences on Photoshop using the frame timeline software, involving a bouncing ball, a falling leaf and a blob shouting. I was also going to animate a multi-eyed monster but didn’t have enough time. To help fully understand how to animate a walk cycle I was asked to take separate photo frames of myself posing, as if I was actually walking and then produce a video sequence on Photoshop along with surrounding the images with an outline, to create another type of locomotion.

I then produced a small walk cycle of a human’s evolution from an ape to a modern day man using separate frames to project the optical illusion effect. I was then asked to come up with an idea from childhood and then try to animate it on Dragon frame, one my of ideas was about me acting out my imagination as child pretending to be a dinosaur.

Originally I was going to animate a story of a small boy visiting a museum that came across three dinosaur statues then imagined himself back in prehistoric times playing games with them, then after he walks away the three statues come to life and whisper about what happened, but due to the amount of time it would take to animate every individual I reduced it down to only the T-Rex roaring. Beforehand I sketched a small stickman prototype storyboard to help plan out the actual story before sketching the A2 frames more professionally.

I decided to base my character designs on American artist Fawn Gehweiler’s style to give my characters a cute lanky appearance. I came across Gehweilers work while looking up practitioners on Pictoplasma.com, hosting numerous attractive artworks of either small advertisements for products or chibi-looking characters in the piece known as Characters at War featuring many cute and bizarre recognisable faces such as Super Mario and Adventure Time. I was also thinking of using Josh Agle’s better known as ShagArt style as a design for my characters, but found Gehweilers style more attractive, easier and quicker.

For my final piece I decided to animate a cute big-eyed lanky T-Rex trying to roar loudly in the Metro Centre to represent a child’s imagination in modern day public. In total I sketched about 20 frames but then had to reduce them down to 18 to reduce the amount of time and save myself the trouble of having to repeat similar frames. After completing 18 frames I had each one photographed and then line tested on Dragon frame to check the locomotion of the character before uploading it onto Photoshop, with a few minor background lines and the escalator being a little bit out of sync. Eventually I was finally able to colour them in and animate them using the video frame timeline on Photo Shop.

Overall I found the first module interesting especially with learning how to animate frames on Photo Shop, I hope to further improve these skills in future assignments.

Edward Muybridge