2D Character Animation Project

INTRODUCTION

I took the Character I designed and developed for the Character Design and Environment Project using Photoshop, I rigged and animated it in After Effects to a piece of audio from the radio.

Planning

The planning for this assignment was to break the character down into sections and extend any segments so that when the character was brought into after effects it could be animated seamlessly.

Schedule

I rigged the character in class and set everything up.

I then went on holiday for a week and wasn’t able to bring my laptop with me.

I then parented the facial features, worked on timing and edited everything together in premier pro.

Mood Board and Colour Pallet

To be completely honest with this character I decided to go a little crazy with textures which is a great colour pallet for children or people on drugs but not for everyday use. I did this because Antonio is from a parallel universe and why shouldn’t everything look like that.

Resource Material

I did a lot of research on bear and chicken shapes and forms and also on character sheets and mouth movements.

STORY

Antonio is a forty-two year old male from a parallel universe’ version of 1800’s Brazil. He is the scrooge of everyday life, so he doesn’t even have friends. Not even his mother liked him and she liked everyone. That never bothered him though he preferred to be alone and actually began to refer to other people as peasants. Antonio became ill with a sickness riddling every part of his body. So he did what he thought was the best option and pulled a Frankenstein of his era and tried to take the best part of each animal and combine it with himself. Since no one liked him, no one cared nor noticed him doing this. Since he didn’t know who Frankenstein was and this world still looked down on science at this time, it was parallel not opposing, needless to say he failed. Though Antonio lived he became a monster, which actually didn’t bother him as now the peasants ran from him and he felt that he had ascended into a god like form. He did eventually find love, a sort of beauty and the beast story except she doesn’t and never will care for him. So now he tries to creep around the small houses to even catch a peak of her as even just the sight of her makes him happy.

Storyboard

DESIGN

Character Design

This character was designed randomly using an exotic corpse method. Where we all drew random parts of the body without knowing what was drawn before or what the end result would be. Then I cleaned up my character while trying to keep the basis of his design.

Sound

The sound was a vox pop given to us by our lecturer who gave us all random times and lengths to animate called ‘Do you think there is more to life?’

Environment Design

I talked about this briefly in the mood board section. I drew out the environment before I even touched Photoshop. Deciding on small details like the roofs and door styles. I then made it up in Photoshop drawing over my original and colouring everything in which in the end I didn’t like. So I thought why not fill it with crazy textures I have no restraint on this parallel universe.

PRE-PRODUCTION

Project set up

I prepared the character in Photoshop and made sure that each limb that was going to be moving was separated onto a different layer and elongated. Then I spent time in class rigging up a prepared character called lildude before I actually took what I’d done and put it into practice with Antonio. When I came back from my holiday I parented the mouths, eyes and eyebrows into the rig.

THE ANIMATION PROCESS

Pose to pose

I decided which mouth shapes to use for the words and then lined them all up in after effects. I chose a more surprised look for his eyes and inserted a blink. I decided not to move his eyebrows because when I said the line over and over again my eyebrows didn’t move at all.

Timing

Timing wasn’t really a challenge for me I kind of guessed and estimated where everything would go and then played it through and it seemed right so I sent the animation to render so that I could check it against the sound file.

Clean up

I brought the animation into the premier pro file where I had cropped the music file. Then I trimmed off any excess that I didn’t need in the animation and spent a short time lining up the music and video file. When that was done I simple saved it as a video file.

POST-PRODUCTION

Rendering

This did not take long as I had only around a second and a half to render. I simply added it to the render queue, set my destination and clicked render.

Reflective Analysis

I again enjoyed making this animation greatly. Though for some reason I think I made it out to be a lot more complicated than it actually was, I couldn’t seem to get the body to move at all even though I have done it before without an issue. The character was meant to tilt his head slightly and move his right arm. I followed everything step by step in my notes to get something to move and it didn’t work and I also asked for help off my classmates and googled it. Personally I think that I may have taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way and overlooked it. The best way at this stage to solve this problem would be to just start again bus since I didn’t have enough time (which is my own fault with the holiday) I have included the practice piece ‘Lildude’ to prove that I can actually animate in after effects.