First Animation

I am not unfamiliar with animation, in fact, I studied animation in highschool. While it might not have been as in depth as I wished it would have been, it has still given me an advantage. Consequently, I was tasked with tackling the animation of our project.

What I consider the most important aspect to keep in mind when animating a character, is to make them look alive. This becomes quite the challange, considering the top-down perspective that we’re using. The fact that we are making the game look like a cartoon from the 20s (see Steamboat Wille(1928) and Betty Boop) makes the looking alive part even more important.  In brief,  the combination of the art style and camera perspective makes for the perfect recepie for disaster, then again, as Mayes told us earlier, this is school  and it is our only chance to experiment and be crazy.

The first problem with animating the Tailor, our main character, was the fact that very few of his features would be visible from above. Sky had the idea that Tailor would lean backwards in the walk cycle, allowing us see his face and belly. I took that idea and gave it some more movement, making him bend backward in anticipation and perform a stomp, pulling his body forward, revealing his face and belly to the camera up above, as suggested by Sky.

My first attempt at animating the walk cycle was not a success, there was too much exaggeration in the feet, and not so much in the upper body where I wanted the energy of the movement to climax. The stomping did apparently not work, so I gave up on giving the animation impact and tried to go for a more flowing, wavey type of movement, making his upper body follow through with the legs, ending in a close whiplash . This worked out just fine, the end result looked very lively, though still not too dramatic.

By the time I was starting to feel done, only had 8 frames for the full walk cycle, I presented the animation to Sky, who to my surprise, was not entirely satisfied. According to him, the animation was not smooth enough, and gave me the task double the frame count. This, i must admit was rather off-putting, having to return to desk to produce a bunch of inbetweens after proudly presenting what I had been working at during the last 6 hours. However, in the end, I must admit it was all worth it, adding those extra frames. The final product looked a lot smoother than it otherwise would. Having someone to push you is without doubt much more helpful than having someone to praise you.