Animate!

For my third mini brief, I had to create a flip book animation. I had various ideas of this and my first one was to make her dance or twirl. Then I started thinking about her clothing and such and I realised it would be harder than it seems so I had a play around with other ideas. One of my peers suggested doing a courtesy but when it came to drawing it, I actually found it harder than the twirl despite the fact it's a more simple movement so I decided to go with my initial idea. 

Here's the storyboard work for my animation. 

[I apologise for the bad quality scan, I'll be updating this post soon and replacing it with a better image]

Since it had to be done in a flip book, I only had to work with 20 pages so for the story board there wasn't really going to be lots of key frames so I stuck to the start, middle and end. As you can see, the sketches don't have much detail, the reason for this is not only because I wanted to focus on the movement, but because it was quite a complex movement, I wanted to keep her as more of a silhouette so it would be easier for me to draw.

I've done story boarding before for a film trailer I produced in my Creative & Media Diploma and what I did was use post-it-notes to help me gather my ideas and get a better feel for each frame and it was easy to do the filming from too. So, I decided to draw my animation out frame by frame on post-it-notes. I just found this easier since I'm able to trace of each image into my sketch book, that said, I didn't trace over the previous drawings like onion skinning, it was merely a method for me to transfer it easily.

And here is my finished animation. It's basically all the above post-it-note drawings all put together in sequence because I drew it frame by frame.

This is is the finished thing that I've transferred over to Photoshop for my blog and portfolio or work. It looks like I did the drawings for this fairly quick but It actually took a long time to do because the twirling motion wasn't as easy as I thought It would be. It sounds simple but it was hard to draw. I think I captured the twirling movement pretty well in this animation though.