Evolution of a simple animation test .... and spaaaaceships.

Been working on a short animation test the past 3 weeks where a character that we developed from scratch simply puts on a coat/jacket.

All told, 3 weeks later, several work sessions where I saw the sun set and then rise (shouldn't it be the other way around?) and almost 1000 drawings later... I have 26 seconds of animation to show for it. Worth it?  Most definitely.  This was probably my most complex animation to date with lots of movement and technical mumbo jumbo such as overlapping action, easing in and outs, timing, texture, etc. etc.

First off, we had to develop our character.  We had two parameters.  It had to be our dachshund's owner (from our dachshund animation) and it had to be an adult.  Some of my classmates had already done this for the "waving" animation, but for that past animation, my character was a child based on my son.

So instead of starting at square one, I decided to age him 20 years.  This was a pretty fun little process.  It's not like I don't imagine the man that my son will grow up to be every single day. ^_^

Once we had a character down, we shot some reference (reference is king!) and from that we built out our key poses.

Then it was animation time!  324 drawings later... whalah!

Wish I had pushed the poses more in the beginning, but I learned a great deal from this project.  Ready for the final! =)

And some spaceships I doodled, inspired by Scott Robertson.