This is a continuation of the DGA 130 background task! I've now finished painting the background and animating all the characters.
I've put all the elements together using After Effects and added in some parallax. I also decided to add in a few sound effects, just as an extra detail.

You can see the result below:

Overall, I think this scene looks pretty good! The character animation works quite well and the sound helps to add a little more to the scene. The parallax and camera move look a little stiff. This is something I can improve on in the future.

For the next DGA 120 weekly task, we had to either animate a fight scene between two people, or a dance cycle. I decided to choose a dance cycle, because I thought it would be more fun to invent a dance.

Below you can see the result:

Overall, I think this piece of animation is ok. I do think however, if I exaggerated the hip movement a little more and tried to offset the arm animation a little more it would work a lot more effectively. By exaggerating movement, I would be able to create something much more entertaining.

I will have to take this into consideration whilst completing future tasks.

For the animated scene segment of our DGA 120 Module that I mentioned in a previous post, we have to create at least 5 characters and animate them!

I tried designing some fairly simple characters. You can see them below:

I thought designs like these would be fairly simple to animate, because none of them have that much detail, but they still look interesting design wise (I think anyway).

As part of our DGA 120 module, in combination with our DGA 130 module, we have to animate at least five characters in a background that we have digitally painted ourselves. I've been making fairly good progress with these animations, I've completed roughly 3 out of the five characters. You can see a test of them in the scene below:

I decided to try and make animating these characters easier for myself by creating animation that would cycle (for the most part). For example, the girl kicking her legs in the water is a cycle, and the boy reading his book is also a cycle! 

For our group project, my next task was animating the rough key frames for the Chinese Segment of the animation. Below you can see a rough test of the very first scene.

This scene is a reflection in a pot of water, hence the wobbly lines.

I'm actually quite happy with how this looks, despite not ever having to animate a reflection before.

For our experimental project, I decided to try and make small transitions to go between my animated segments. These transitions will give hints about what the next section will be focused on.

I decided to create these transitions using frame by frame drawing. So sort of like stop motion animation!

Below  you can see the results so far:

Each one is a simple doodle of things I enjoy, like drawing, tea and listening to music. I also decided that making an introduction and ending segment in this style would be wise, since it would be consistent with the rest of the animation.

I still have a few more of these to do, but overall I'm pretty happy with how they turned out. The lines do look a little rough, but that's because I'm drawing each one line by line so it will look like a time lapse of drawing.

For our DGA 120 Motion Studies Module, we're being given weekly tasks to complete. I've gotten a little behind updating the blog with those, so that's what this post is about.

For the third week, we were asked to record ourselves (or someone else) acting out the line 'I love you'. The line could be said in anyway we wanted, so long as it has some kind of change in emotion in it, so from happy to upset for example.

Below you can see my final attempt:

I'm quite happy with the final result (apart from my bad acting of course), the lip sync is pretty well timed with the voice track and the movement helps to understand the change in emotion from happy/enthusiastic to irritated.

Although I do think exaggerating the movements a little bit would have made the animation better and more entertaining.

For our DGA 120 Motion Studies Module, we're being given weekly tasks to complete. I've gotten a little behind updating the blog with those, so that's what this post is about.

For the second week, we were asked to animate some sort of quadruped walking. I chose a dog, because I thought there would be more real world references for their walks.

Below you can see my final attempt:

I think overall, the leg movement looks good, but it does stop a little at the end of the cycle instead of looping smoothly. The head and tail movement are not as good, I focused on the legs a lot more, since they were the focus of the task. The head jerks around a little too much and the tail doesn't really move the way it would on an actual dog.

I think if I did this again in the future, I would collect a lot more references, specifically for the dog's head and tail movement.

For our DGA 120 Motion Studies Module, we're being given weekly tasks to complete. I've gotten a little behind updating the blog with those, so that's what this post is about.

In the first week, we were asked to animate an exaggerated walk cycle from both a side view and front view. Below you can see my attempts:

I actually found this task quite difficult. The walk I chose to try was a kind of confident march, so I tried to get that across by making the legs and arms swing a little more. I found offsetting the arms and legs in the side view particularly difficult.

I think that if I did this again in the future, I would collect a lot more reference material for my chosen walk, since this time around, I only had two, which wasn't enough for me to properly understand the movement.

I mentioned previously that we also needed to plan and add character animation to our painted environment that we're creating in DGA 130, so I decided to very roughly plan out where my characters will be stood/placed in the scene. Below you can see the result:

So this is a very simple layout of the scene, before I added the detail. But from this I can see where my characters will be in my scene.

The character animation we have to implement has some guidelines. They are as follows:

- Must include at least 5 characters

- Must include a looping animation

- Must include a walk/run/skip

- Must include a character throwing/catching/kicking

-Must include an interaction between at least two characters

- Must include some kind of visual effect

- Must include a camera move

I've planned roughly how each of the five characters in my scene will fulfill those criteria:

- Character 1 will be lent against the tree in the foreground throwing a small ball from hand to hand, this fulfills the 'throwing/catching/kicking' criteria

- Character 2 will be kicking their legs in the pond, splashing the water. This will fulfill the 'visual effect' and 'looping animation' criteria (and also the throwing/kicking/catching one technically)

- Characters 3 and 4 will be walking along together, this fulfills the 'walk/run/skip' and 'interaction between at least two characters' criteria.

- Finally Character 5, I think they'll be playing with some kind of small toy, which fulfills the 'looping animation' criteria again.  

For another part of our DGA 130 Module, we have to digitally paint an environment based off of a text prompt we've been given. Also, since I decided to pick the 2D route for my DGA 120 Motion Studies Module, I'll have to incorporate a certain amount of character animation into the background scene once it's finished!

First we were asked to sketch our idea for the landscape, below you can see my attempt:

As you can see I deliberately made the layout fairly simple. This is so, when I go to animate the characters in the scene, I am able to plan their actions around the environment, without worrying about complex elements. I'm quite happy with how this looked, however after I finished this version, I remembered I had to add some kind of camera move or parallax to the scene, so I need to extend the environment slightly in order to do this.