Process

If I have learnt anything from this project, it is that traditional animation is a lot of work! But it always pays off.

Planning the animation was difficult, I basically drew out key frames that were similar to the ones in my second Animatic, and drew even more to get a better idea of how the animation would work. I then laid these key frames out in numbers such as 1,5, 9, 12 etc and drew the in-betweens. Every drawing was done in pen.

Here is an example of how I was working. I own a lightbox that made the process easier. It was really the first time I'd used my light box other than to clean up drawings. I'm a lot more confident with it now, and it is a lot easier to work with than Flash's Onionskin tool.

I ended up drawing about, i'd say, 200 drawings on the lightbox, but only about 100 made it into the final animation. A lot of these were pencil sketches, mistakes, and "templates" (I drew one head in marker to trace, just to make sure I wasn't going off-model)

To do the "zooming" effect, I will admit I cheated! I couldn't zoom using just flash, as this pixelated the image, and made the lines expand. So I printed out a number of images of the pixelated images, and just redrew them.

test colour
animated GIF

I did intend for the final piece to be completely coloured. But after colouring these 5 frames in photoshop (took me at least 40 mins, and it's still messy) , I decided that it would take far too long. I would, in the future, love to colour this for my portfolio. Also, this obviously isn't a full loop of the walk cycle.