Animating

Over the last week, I have had the privilege to participate in various animating workshops.

Last tuesday for example, I took part in a rotoscoping workshop, where I videoed myself swishing my hair from side to side. The animating aspect, is created by opening the video in Adobe Photoshop and converting it into frames. I chose to create 24 seconds per frame, which is actually quite a lot and I still haven't gotten round to finishing the animation, so maybe next time I can get away with 12 frames per second, or something in between. You can put all these layers into one folder. In another folder, create a new layer to match the layers of the video, and draw over each frame on these new layers. When you then hide the video layers, you are left with an animated sequence of your drawings.

These are some of the layers I have done all shown together:

Down the right hand side you can see all the layers. On the bottom is all the frames. Each new layer will be correspond to each frame, so when played, the drawn images will look animated.

And below is how far I have gotten. I have drawn 39 frames so far.

I feel this particular style might be useful in depicting the movements of the rhinos, by using the footage provided in the BBC Africa program of rhinos at the watering hole during night. This scene was particularly influential to my animation ideas as a basis for the setting and scene.

I have also participated in an After Effect workshop where I drew a very rubbish drawing of a rhino, drawing each moving limb separately and very simply. When transferred into After Effect, these limbs can then be moved accordingly, to create the appearance of animation. Here is my incredibly rubbish animation: (I suppose you have to start somewhere.)

And the last one is an animation I created using Adobe Flash. This was a workshop with alumni student of Illustration at the Arts University Bournemouth, Jonny Clapham. I like the techniques involved in using Flash, although it is more suited to graphic illustration. This has got me thinking that maybe working digitally may benefit this project more than creating the images by hand, as it seems it will be more time consuming. This is something I will have to test out through a series of day workshops I give myself, to create a moving character by means of analog vs digital, and how much I can achieve with each using the same process of animation. Anyway for now, here is my animation using Flash: