Extended Practice: Weekly Blogpost - Animation Production

For my third shot that involves animation, it was the first time both characters of Cop and Lucy appear onscreen together.

I knew the shot was going to be complicated. The reason for this is not only because both characters are onscreen together, but they also are walking towards the camera, meaning they grow in size. Enlarging one character without distorting their proportions is complicated enough but doing it with two different characters who grow at the same time and also need to stay in proportion to each other is even more complicated. Luckily I'm working with Animate that allows me to move frames about and resize frames effortlessly so at this point I did not worry too much about it.

Gaining Reference Material

I knew this was a shot that was too complicated for me not use reference material for. Initially in the Live Action Video I had used Malachi and Sylvia as my actors. Unfortunately I had not staged the camera right and they were not quite the right physicality's for me to reference, Sylvia was a tad too tall to pull off a ten year old. Annabeth had also given me feedback to be careful when referencing adults acting out the parts of children, it could quite easily look uncanny and my animated character could just resemble an adult acting like a child. I was cautious of this so decided to find someone who has a physicality that most resembles a ten year old.

Luckily, I found Brenda who turned out to be the perfect actor. Her movements were so exaggerated and she walked in a way that was so bizarre that a ten year old just definitely would walk like if asked to carry something heavy. I did not tell her to walk like this but she definitely inspired the animation of the character. 

Furthermore, Gavin also turned out to be an excellent actor. His physicality in this shot is slow and rigged which is the opposite of Lucy's and just like the character.

Animating the shot

Essentially I went about animating the shot the same way I had for the other two by animating roughs, then the neats on Animate CC. But this was also the first shot in which the characters interact with their environments, in that the Cop opens the front door of their house. Since the rest of the background designs had been coloured with felt tip, I knew it would look out of place if the door was painted digitally. Therefore I printed each doorframe line work keyframe still onto paper then coloured each keyframe of the door before placing each hand coloured frame back into the animation. While this was slightly time-consuming process, I feel that in the end it really added to the visual aesthetic of the animation.