Animated Narratives - Week 11 'Animation Prototyping Pt 1'

This week I started to do some rough animation trials, with keyframing and a little bit of in between frames to make the rough animatic appear smoother. The main goal of this week’s task was to produce animations that are understandable, stories are well conceived even without an active narration. Out of the 7 montage pieces listed, 3 were chosen to be completed this week. This included the champion show dog, arctic fox and the celestial dog. I have chosen to complete these in Adobe Animate, because some research showed that Adobe Animate was intuitive to learn and had fairly comprehensive functionalities.

I have chosen this rough animation format to combine the processes of storyboarding and keyframing, and very rough time stamping (which involved prolonging the duration of a frame if this ‘action’ was needed for longer). The work produced here will act as the foundational basis which will be refined in the future. In other words, this is considered as the drafting stage of my animation.

Technique wise, I was heavily inspired by Alan Becker and his tutorials on Youtube. I followed along with walk cycle tutorials, principles of animation videos which were extremely helpful in producing more visually impactful work (Squish and stretch, exaggeration etc). Another helpful resource lies with older Disney 2D animations. Films like Bambi, Alice in Wonderland, and Lion King all feature spectacular animation for four legged creatures. From Bambi’s light and timid steps to the White Rabbit’s frantic hopping, so much personality were captured just through the movements of these creatures. I tried to assign my ‘dogs’ with appropriate personality, weight and behaviour. For example, the celestial dog moves in a very fluid, no resistance and free way which is correct for the zero gravity nature of space.

The basic storyline of these animatics were told in the script produced last week, so this week’s work just focused on visualising those concepts. However the sequence of some were altered from the script, some unnecessary actions (show dog jumping hoop) were removed so that I could focus on other more important actions (such as the walk cycle itself).

Downloads:

Download File: show-dog.gif
Download File: fox-dog.gif
Download File: astro.gif