Elements Animation Development: Dog Teddy being placed on the grass

The next scene i animated was the very first, we see the little girl place her dog teddy on the grass. Its a close up shot of the dog teddy so we only really see her hand on screen. When she takes her hand away the teddy collapses into the position it is in for the duration of the animation.

The creation of this sequence was aided heavily by the usage of key-frames. These key-frames to be exact...

Drawing the key-frames was the challenge because the dog's size and dimensions needed to remain the same or as similar as possible as did the girl's hand and arm. I took reference photos to work from so this was made a lot easier...










Doing the in-between frames was far easier, i would roughly sketch out each frame with coloured pencils then once i'd scanned all the roughs into the computer and played them back at 12 frames per second I found that they flowed rather nicely. Perhaps the actual motion of the dog teddy collapsing could have been faster to resemble real-time, but in the end I felt I quite liked the slow motion effect. Besides, with barely a few days left and quite a lot of frames left to produce, I understood I really did't have the time to be cutting frames.

So with that in mind I took all my rough frames, traced over them with a fine-line pen and scanned the neat frames into the computer.