Something that resonated with me a lot in todays class was zoetropes. These are looping animations that can be handmade by having a series of frames lining a cylinder so that when it is spun, it appears animated. I wanted my exercise to emulate this cyclical sense by visually creating a circular looping movement, whether in the movement path of an object or in the object I was animating itself
To start with, I decided to animate lunar phases. This felt like a strong starting point in that it is a very iconic thing that exists in reality that can be represented very easily and clearly. I wanted to add complexity to my piece by including additional objects around the moon. In the sense of how the zoetrope works like a spinning tube or cyclinder, I decided to have an object orbiting my waxing/waning moon animation. I chose to use a rabbit because of the association in Chinese mythology of there being a rabbit living on the moon.
The most difficult part of this exercise was figuring out how I could take my animated rabbit and make it hop on a path of a circle. I found that frame by frame in Toon Boom was tedious and a convoluted method, and instead figured out how to use Null Objects in Adobe After Effects to make my rabbit hop around as I wanted it to
