For this semester I learned about animation and the principles and processes behind it. I did this through the creation of a hand-drawn animated video.
Being inexperienced in the animation field, a lot of research was done in methods and principles used to create an animation. Like the 12 principles of animation introduced by the Disney animators Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas in their 1981 book The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation. These principles, ranging from timing to exaggeration, are followed by nearly all in conveying a motion in a moving image.
In starting my creative process, I started with multiple different sketches, some focusing on emotions and facial expression and others on different character design I could possibly use. These were good because they allowed me to find a design style for my animations and have references for some of the characters. Later on I did find my time available and ability dictated the designs, as they needed to be at the same time simple enough to draw multiple times but also convey the motion I wanted to show.
Next I looked at simple animation motions to test and practice on, first looking at a walk cycle, which gives me some good reference for later walking characters and also understand the key frames in displaying a walking motion. Using what I understood from the walk cycle allowed me to create a stick figure animation. This animation allowed me to use some of the principles from before and also learn about communicating through movement. As well as get better acquainted with naturally moving a character.
From those I decided to start with creating small animations and build upon each one adding to what I was able to learn from each one until I chose to work on my final animation for presenting. To start I looked at storyboarding different ideas until I found some that I believed I could animated and I liked, like the one below about the fish. This storyboard would help in getting the timing of the animation and framing it correctly.
For creating my animations I used Adobe Flash, as I thought that since I knew how to use some of the other Creative Cloud Software I should be able to learn Flash relatively quickly. Using Flash I was able to get into animating pretty fast, starting with stick figure animations to test and figure out how to show certain motions, like a walk cycle which gave me a better understanding of how key-frames work to show the extremes of a motion and the more frames transitioning between them the longer the motion lasts. This allowed me to use understand some of the principles from before and learn about where they can be used in situations as well as learning about communicating through movement.
Below is my first animation, which taught me a lot in the timing of the frames. As leaving a frame showing longer highlighted the image at the time by allowing the viewer to see it properly, while faster frames could smooth motion. I believe it came out pretty good and allowed me to show some of the principles I had researched, like follow through and slow in and out.
When starting on my final animations, I went through the same process as my previous ones, but but each storyboard I would find areas of the animations which I could incorporate the animation principles into. The animations I chose to create, I chose because of they had this overarching theme of sports and their ability to show some of the principles.
Animatics were the next step that was different due to the more moving parts in my final animations, these rough animations helped hugely in figuring out the timing for my animations, as I found that before using them my animations sometimes felt slow and clunky or to fast to see. From that I was animating the work, in which I animated in the frame-by-frame technique starting with the focus character and its motion and everything else after. While this did take much longer than tweening a animation, it did give me much more room to incorporate the principles and create more freely moving animations.
While initially I wanted to incorporate a mixture of live action stop motion elements with my 2D animations, as I progressed with mixing them, I found my animations became stilted and their motion either not looking fluid or not working with the stop motion parts. I believe this to be due to the more complicated planing stage of this animation, as everything needed to be planed before hand, because if you filmed something wrong it would impact the animation and vice versa. Also because I was sort of skipping ahead and found I needed to be more practiced in the animation area. So for my final animations I focused on just the 2D area and I think my work became better for it.
For my final video I chose the to display the animations that I believe show all the principles of animations that could be shown. All the principles related to the creation process, I also used in creating these animations. While creating the animations I initially estimated to make around four or five, but as I found out in the creation process, to get that many animations to the standard I wanted to and have them include some of the principles would have taken to much time. Instead I chose to animate the scenes that showed a lot of movement and could show multiple principles within it at the same time. This lead to me making the theme of my animations on sports because of the natural movement focused nature of them and multiple parts involved between the characters and the objects used within the sports.
My reasoning for wanting to work on this project was mainly because of my interest in this area, especially the traditionally hand-drawn animation style, as you see less and less of it now. Also because understanding motion and animation would help with other fields I’m interested in, like for example game design and helps in bettering some of my skills that could be used in a lot of other areas, like illustrating and story boarding. I believe it also helped me a bit in communicating through motion, having no dialogue or sound made me find ways of telling the viewers something another way.
Overall I believe my final animations came out pretty good, and did make me think about how I incorporate the principles of animation into them and learn a lot about motion and conveying ideas in animations. If I did have more time though I probably would have looked at sound and its impact on a animation as well as possibly introducing the stop motion elements again. Otherwise I would have definitely made more animations and refined my animations that I did finish as I found that frame-by frame animation takes awhile and I found when getting close to the end of this assignment I more had trouble with time being the factor of doing certain animations like I wanted, than having not learned about an area that I needed to know about to create the animation I wanted.
