Animated Narratives - Week 12 'Animation Prototyping Pt 2'

I continued on with the rough animation trials from last week, with the same intentions of developing keyframes and in-between frames. 3 more of the montage pieces were chosen and made into rough trials. This included the Egyptian gods (Anubis and Horus), Aztec god of fire and lightning (Xolotl) and the hellhound himself (Cerberus). From doing the animatics last week, I’ve consolidated some animation techniques and familiarised myself with Adobe Animate. So this week, I wanted to challenge myself a bit more with more complex and longer animations. I also wanted to give a bit more personality to the competing dogs and overall make the rough animations a bit more interesting to look at.

Again, the rough animation format is the ‘drafting’ process, and is the basis for refinement later on. Refinement will include cleaner lineart (no longer sketch), colours (potentially a bit of rendering/shading?). Using Adobe Animated has made this process a lot smoother because it was really easy to move frames around, length the duration of frames (or playing with timing), duplicate frames etc.

This week I wanted to experiment a little more with varying camera angles, perspective and zoom. So I looked into action anime such as One Punch Man (author: ONE) and My Hero Academia  (author: Kohei Horikoshi). Both animes were well known for epic fighting sequences with a lot of emphasis on exaggeration of anatomy, perspective and camera angles. I wouldn’t dare dreaming of reaching such a level of detail but was hopeful that this will serve as inspiration to help improve my work.

Compared to the finished results from last week, I think my animations were more dynamic and interesting this week. I’ve tried to have more dramatic camera angles to hint at scale and proportions (looking up at the dog because he’s so tall). I also attempted to build on the personalities and characteristics of the dogs. For example, Anubis and Horus are very dignified Egyptian gods and were utterly embarrassed when they were found squatting and playing cards in a not very elegant manner. As another example, the hellhound is no doubt a menacing creature, but even he had a moment of goofiness when he was stuck in the hell gate. Additionally for the last animation, I tried to build a more abstract animation as a trial to see if that would make the work appear more interesting. (eyes fading into a gate etc.) I feel like this approach utilises the medium of animation better than just fading from scene to scene. It abuses (in a good way) the fact that 2D frame by frame hand-drawn animations have no physical or rigid constraints.

Downloads:

Download File: 1622456662_xolotl.gif
Download File: 1622456664_egyptian-gods-long.gif
Download File: 1622456688_cerberus.gif