Roots - an animation

 "A short animated sequence featuring your historical character. This short animation can be any length you want it to be, but must be a minimum of 10 seconds. This animation can include sound if you feel it appropriate This animation should showcase skills developed on the module and include some of the 12 principles of animation."

12 PRINCIPLES OF ANIMATION

- Aiming to include as many as possible

- Easiest to include = squash and stretch, anticipation, exaggeration

- Hardest to include = staging, secondary, appeal

- (Difficulty just relevant to me)

MAIN INSPIRATION

- Nephtali by Glen Keane

- Pencil sketch style

- Secondary animation in hair and fabric flowing

- Strong anticipation for such an elegant subject

- Overall very fluid 

THE PROCESS

- Imported storyboard in from Storyboard Pro

- Converted everything into 2 layers

- Made new animation layer and started to animate select bits of scenes

- Initial animation of Garrett's squash and stretch did not work

- Drew stretch but no squash, therefore there was no anticipation and it looked unnatural

- Redrew and fixed everything, adjusted timings and ensured a good balance of squash and stretch

- Smoke was harder to animate than anticipated

- Couldn't wrap my head around how the smoke should move in frame-by-frame

- Ended up still doing it well

- This scene marked the start of the fully animated section of the animatic-animation

- All music cut out at this point, left only ambient sound

-Silhouette not animated the best

- Animated walk cycle and head movements separately in order for it to look more natural, and for the character to look more curious in the manner in which he was looking around

- Used straight ahead for walk cycle

- Used pose-to-pose for head movements

- One of the hardest shots to animate

- So much overlapping action - walk cycle, arms, gun draw, lip syncing, and background movement

- Ended up working very well

- Second only to this shot, which was way worse

- Had to stop and come back to it

- Could not understand how the feet move from a front angle

- Took video of own feet as reference

- Decent to animate

- Ended up being animated a lot more slowly than a normal person speaks

- Voice actor had to watch along to line up speech

- Ended up working out fine

- Eyes very fun to animate, favourite shots

- Quick succession of the two clips makes for good anticipation as lead up for the gunshot

- I had a vision

- That vision came into fruition

- Tweening in background, still image, smoke only animation

- Pleased with credits screens

- Could not do handwritten type

- Picked a font that worked well with the rest of the animation

FINAL ANIMATION

EVALUATION

- Was not as fluid as I would have hoped - style of Keane's was so smooth and beautiful, yet still very visibly handmade

- Does not make mine a bad animation

- For a first animation, very successful :)

- Could work on having smoother lines and more definition like Keane

- First Pat Garrett scene showing examples of squash and stretch and exaggeration (moustache)

- Good example of timing and how I fixed it, as initial version did not work

- Solid drawing and very clear

- Lacking in appeal - could have been coloured, or at least smoother in linework

- Could have included more arcs here and there

- Arcs shown immediately in swinging lantern, as well as slow in and outs

- Forgot to include sound for second gun movement

- Could have included another arm movement

- Most proud of this shot

- Incredibly simple but very effective

- Fast tweening into slow gave the impact of the gunshot

- Love how the music fades back into the gunshot