Responsive: LoopdeLoop Sisters - Animating and Using Refference

As with all my animations almost all movement I had to either act out before had or reference in some way. Referencing I believe to be one of the most important parts of animation and the more I use of it, the more realistic the movements I animate are.

I'm aware that visually my characters are fairly simplistic and not that realistic with big heads and big eyes, elongated knees etc. but if watch Studio Ghibli films has taught me anything, it's that it doesn't really matter how simplistic a character looks, it's in their personality and physicality that makes them relatable to the viewer.

I don't just use reference for animating movement, I also reference for most of my backgrounds as I can never think of how to plan out rooms for example so reference helps with understand how big a door should be in comparison to a character for example.

Now for almost referencing I prefer to use live action and real life, so nothing that has been created by humans or drawn, just because I feel like if I was referencing a hand and I just referenced a drawing of a hand it would basically be like copying and I wouldn't develop my own techniques in any way. That being said, in my animation there is a scene where the studying sister squeezes the annoying sister's head and it explodes, and there isn't a great deal of live-action reference material for that. So I had to look at how they do it in animation and the most useful reference material I found was in the animated series South Park.

The head explosion scene took four days to animate even though it was only around six frames long so half a second. The reasons for this justified the amount of time taken as not only was it highly complicated to figure out but I also had to incorporate colour which added to how complicated the scene was to animate. 

In the end I feel it looked very successful although I wish I didn't have to reference South Park so much for it as that does feel like slightly cheating, although if it wasn't for the clip I referenced I would have had no idea about how to go about animating the scene.