This has been quite difficult for me as I don’t tend to gravitate towards drawing animals unless they are static. I have tried a colour blocking technique in the final animation, as I really want to try animating silhouettes.

Quadruped walks are the bane of animating walk cycles. I understood the way the legs manoeuvre but the direction of feet confused me. Every time I tried to fix the flow of the animation, it didn’t work – I couldn’t quite get the movement right.

I moved from animal to animal and I still was not able to get the flow of the character on point. I decided to choose a fox for this cycle, as an actual fox has been following me around (Maggie) – I tried to colour block and shaded the back legs. However, the animation still feels a bit janky.

This was my first time trying out TV Paint, and this exercise was a great one to start off with – as I hadn’t done any animation prior to this course. Since, I didn’t have TV Paint at home – I used procreate. Procreate is great for doing small animations, but not animated films.

I have done many iterations of the ‘Bouncy Character’. This happens to be my least favourite. I struggled to find a character I really wanted to animate – not to mention – the follow through’s were also a massive struggle.

I was struggling to think of an idea to push this animation forward, so I decided to sketch out some characters with limbs. Even though I liked the look of these drawings, they reminded me of a very famous character from Monster’s Inc. I also thought that the limbs were a bit complex for my first animation.

Redoing My First Attempt

I struggled with the mood change walk, I feel it’s something that I wouldn’t realistically put in a short film. I would most likely do a mood change shot from the torso upwards.

I felt that for me, it leaned towards the ‘cartoon’ style of animation – where a particular over-exaggerated movement can somehow relate to a character being happy or depressed (which were the examples given). I had a real conflict between how character’s display emotion in real life as oppose to animation.

I chose to animate ‘the lift’, because I wanted to see how the character would react to a heavy object. As my initial attempt, it is lacking flow and a sense of weight for the object. In my further attempts, I intend add a realistic flow by using real life references. I would like to be at a stage where the animation is fluid in its drawn state.