Intro to Making of: FINAL BIG BRIEF (Creative Conscience Competition) Phase III Production of Animat

April 5,2017 It is now the start of the holidays and after my team's last meeting, we now find ourselves in the production stage of our project. Because I am doing the animation for our competition entry, I have started off by making sure my other teammates are on the same page. I firstly made sure Matei knew what resolution we were working with for our video. He was to draw the background, I told him the length didn't matter. As far as I was concerned, he could draw the background as long as he wanted. I had given him some basic sketches of the layout for the background.

Instead what he had to be sure of was the height of the 'stage'. Following the basic dimensions of HD video (1920 x 1080 pi), the height was to be 1080, and from there Matei could do what he wanted with the length. Meanwhile, I created an Adobe Flash document with a stage of 1920 x 1080 pixels and imported the drawings I had previously scanned into my computer. I had essentially 4 versions of the protagonist to animate from. These were all the side view elevations I had sketched out in my concept art that showed the boy getting exponentially fatter and fatter.

With only 2 weeks until the deadline, I had my work cut out for myself. This was going to be hard on all of us, but at this moment in time, especially for myself because there was a lot I was going to have to animate.

I therefore put this task at the top of my priorities list and set to work on the animation.

I firstly created symbols for each stage of the character.

I copied a symbol from a previous walk cycle animation I had created. This helped me study how the legs moved and helped me emulate a similar motion onto my protagonist character's legs.

I decided to mainly animate in motion tweens, rather than frame by frame animation to be more economic with time.

However I did use frame by frame only for the motion of the legs as I didn't want the walk to look too robotic. This was a long process and I feared I was spending too much time on this part of the animation, and as a result, I thought I would not have enough time for the rest of the characters.

That being said the frame by frame animation got easier as I animated each character. I could use the previous iteration of the protagonist to trace around a set of new legs for the new protagonist.

I followed the same animation process each time, using symbol components within motion tweens until I had an array of character symbols that could be placed into our final animation. The only thing that began to change with each version of the protagonist was the tracing over of each of my sketches. I could just trace over the the top half of the character and re use the frame by frame leg animation form the previous symbols. I have completed the character animations and now I am ready to hand this over to my team mates in our next meeting so that we may combine them all together to create some sort of animatic. All the characters walks together: