Illusion of Life: Week 7 Textures and Colours

Experiment: The Animation of the Texture

The aim of the experiment is to test out whether the concept of syncing the timing of the texture animation to the background is applicable. In theory, the bird character will be animated at a faster pace while the background animation plays slower. It is to support my studio project at its core as I’m dealing with two different frame rates for the main character and the side characters (crowd). I would like to know if I could synchronise the texture animation to the side characters to create a sense of they are in the comic while the main character is the “awakened” one. The same concept applies here, the background represents the comic and the front character represents the “awakened”.

This week's experiment took inspiration from “Duck Amuck” (1953) where the Daffy Duck is reacting to the environment created by the animator. At first, I drew out sketches of the situation/ environment the cock robin character might be in. Then, I selected two of them and continuously researched the topic, the disco dance floor and the sea. Different types of character animations have been developed for different scenes. For the dance floor scene, I decided to go with dance poses blocking, a rather action-based animation. For the sea scene, I decided to express the cock robin’s emotion aroused by the environment instead of having the character act in it. I created a relaxing-looking cock robin and just let it float with the flow.

Synchronising the texture animation with the background animation was quite easy as both the disco and the sea background animation are going at the same speed (12fps). The main concern I have for this is that the side characters blocking in my studio project move at an uneven pace so that I might have to sync that up manually. Also, the texture animation doesn’t help creating the sense that the front character is “awakened” in this experiment. Maybe I should have created a cut-out look for the cock robin or have a stronger texture look to pop the difference between frame rates out.

In short, this is a good run for my studio project. I discovered problems that I could still fix in the texture so that the project could be pushed better.