Dialogue

It's hard to believe we're already at the final project of the semester! The goal of this project was to animate a short, 5-10 second clip of a character speaking and acting to dialogue. The dialogue I ended up choosing for this assignment was a snippet of conversation from the game Kid Icarus: Uprising, between the flightless angel Pit and the goddess Palutena that he serves. It's a personal favorite game of mine and a large part of that is because of the clever writing and quippy characters, so I knew I wanted to pull something from this game. The original conversation was about 20 seconds long, but I ended up cutting to just the first 5 seconds.

The character designs in Kid Icarus: Uprising are extremely detailed, with many intricate elements. They're animation unfriendly, to put it mildly, and I did a bit of experimenting on how to simplify their designs to the most basic elements before the assignment formally started. After that point, I did some rough boarding to get the general poses for the actions down. In this stage, I covered both Pit and Palutena, but I knew that animating two different characters would be very time-consuming. In the context of the conversation source (and most of the game itself), Palutena speaks to Pit via telepathy and is usually not physically present. As such, given this fact and her very limited speaking role in the clip compared to Pit, I was fully prepared to cut her from the project if the workload panned out. Miraculously, I ended up being able to include her in the final project within just one day, though I did have to cut a lot of movement on her part to make it work.

Surprisingly, animating the spoken dialogue was one of the smoothest parts of the project. I had taken footage of myself lipsyncing and acting to the dialogue and studied it extensively, so I was able to get to a point where the mouth movement synced up with the dialogue pretty quickly. In that respect, I'm pretty satisfied with the project. What really ate up my time was the intricacies of Pit's body animation. Even after simplying his design, there was still a lot of moving parts to account for, and the length of this project was far longer than anything up to this point.

Admittedly, part of that workload was unnecessarily put on myself for animating the project entirely on 1s. It would have been much easier to work on 2s or 3s for the majority of the assignment, but by the time I realized this after subconsciously working on 1s for a while, I had done so much work that cutting and rearranging a ton of it would have left me feeling worse. At one point while working on this project over the weekend, I had also gotten approached by a friend who had taken the class and said that the very rough boarded poses would have worked just fine for the assignment. I'm not sure whether this still holds true or not, since most of the in-class examples were fully animated from what I remembered, but if so then it would've been another area in which I did extra.

In spite of all these difficulties, however, I'm reasonably pleased with the end result, and it's probably one of my favorite results from this semester nonetheless. As I completed more and more layers of the project, I eventually hit a point where I'd just hit play every so often to watch the project come together. Seeing all the work put in come to life is a really gratifying feeling, and I'm grateful I got the ability to practice my animation skills through this class.

Walk Cycle

 

Transitioning into the walk cycle project, I was curious how smoothly it was going to proceed. I had previously had experience creating walk cycles in 3-D thanks to my 3D Animation 1 class, and it was my assumption at the time that a lot of the knowledge in creating one there would transfer over to 2D animation. For what it's worth, I'd say I was half-right! The project began with me knowing how to divide up a 24-frame walk into 8 keyframes, and I quickly put together something that I was happy with.

The challenges for this project that were unique to 2D animation rose up later. The first hurdle was deciding how to divide my 8 keyframes into 12, as the assignment was meant to be animated on 2s. I ultimately decided to split up the remaining 4 keyframes in a pattern to keep the balance and stability of the animation. From there, I had to do tweaking of the blocked-out shapes such as the arms and legs to accomodate sleeves and details, which wasn't too difficult. The final tweak I made to my character was their hair; it had come out stiff compared to the way everything else moves, and I had to do a bit of redrawing to get it to look more natural. Compared to 3D Animation, where we didn't have to rig any part of the hair at all for assignments, this was something I had to pay a lot more attention to.

Perhaps the most frustrating part of the project was setting up the peg and the ensuing problems it caused. I had known for a while that I wanted the background to scroll during the walk cycle, so I drew a very long background early into the project with the intention of making it scroll later on. Unfortunately, it took me longer than I would have liked to get the peg to work properly, and I found it rather unintuitive to set up. 

The other problem with the moving background was that I didn't want part of it to show through the character via overlap. I figured the easier option was to simply color in the character through a new layer, rather than erasing from each frame of the background's movement. However, I had trouble getting the fill / paint tool to work with me, so I had to instead box out every single frame with color and then erase around the outlines of my character. If the paint tool had been more co-operative, it would have been nice to give proper colors to my character, as I haven't done that with any of my projects before.

Weight

 

After the complications I went through with the head turn assignment, and knowing that future assignments were likely going to become even more complex, I decided to stick with something simpler in execution for the weight assignment. I recorded reference footage of myself hoisting up an object, first to chest level, and then lifting it over my head. Then, my goal was to translate this into an animation.

Although sticking with a smaller and more simplified style for the character helped to speed up the individual process of drawing each frame, it introduced some interesting challenges in terms of maintaining volume control. In particular, finding a good balance between stretching out the arms so they can hold the box and lift it over a large head while making sure to mask this increase in length as much as possible was something I did a lot of re-iterating on. To further build around this detail, I applied exaggeration to principles such as squash and stretch, taking advantage of the character's unique build to sell a more cartoonish situation and make the adjustment of volume less out-of-place.

Head Turn

 

For the process of animating a head turn, I chose to use one of my original characters. Luckily, the process of animating the head to move smoothly and in a convincing arc wasn't too difficult. Instead, the real challenge was in getting everything else to follow the head precisely!

The first major hurdle came with the body. Outside of the arm lines, I had a difficult time trying to understand the way that the body and especially the neck would twist over the course of the animation. After animating the body and face, I was faced with an even greater challenge: the hair. I broke it down into several basic shapes: one for the bangs, two for the side partings, and one for the ponytail. Though it definitely made the process of adding the hair in afterwards easier, it was still rather time-consuming. The way that the bangs parted in particular forced me to answer questions about the design of my character on the spot in order to make sure that the hair stayed connected and consistent.

Though I wouldn't call it a "difficult" final step, cleaning up all the layers one frame at a time in order to make sure nothing overlapped incorrectly and erasing all the guiding lines I previously used was also a very intricate process. This was definitely the most intensive assignment of the class by far, and one that I wish I had a little more time to work with. However, I'm happy with the final result nonetheless. It's really rewarding to be able to see the final project come to life at the very end after hours of work.

Flour Sack Animation

 

For my flour sack animation, I chose to recreate an example of a victory dance featured in the Kirby series. In terms of body composition, I thought that Kirby and the flour sack were somewhat similar, having a simple main body with stubby appendages in the place of arms and legs, so using an animation from this series as a reference from this project came to mind immediately. However, I soon came to learn that there were many differences between these two characters and styles of animation that would prove a challenge to adapt.

I broke my animation into several "moves" to simplify the process for myself. The timeline of the animation is as follows: first, a victorious key pose, performing a "wave" motion with the flour sack's "arms", a spin with arms raised that transitions back to the victory pose, a short hop, a backflip, and finally a return to the key pose after an exaggerated landing crouch. Given the speed of this scene and thr amount of actions that the character takes, trying to cram them all in fluidly while still adhering to typical animation principles such as timing and spacing was tricky. The flour sack having their limbs tied to the corners of their body also made hitting some of the more exaggerated motions such as the wave or the crouch difficult. Kirby's arms and feet typically have the freedom to slide around his body slightly as he lacks any joints, but this is not something I could feasibly recreate with the flour sack.

In spite of, or perhaps partially because of these interesting challenges, I had a lot of fun recreating this dance sequence. In particular, I'm really happy with how snappy the sequence of the hop, backflip, and crouch came out. My main regret is not looking into how to sync up the proper music to back the animation - it would probably make the dance all the more lively!

Flour Sack Gestures

 

This assignment was broken up into two parts: I created a gesture sheet for a flour sack character that I would then reference for an animation using this character. I ended up creating two different sheets; the original one was done on my usual art program and featured more basic poses as I got used to recreating the proportions and features for my flour sack, while the second sheet was done afterwards on Harmony and allowed me to work with more expressive and outlandish poses. This second one in particular was helpful for me in understanding how to push some of the more elaborate poses I ended up using in the animation.

Overlapping Action and Followthrough

 

For this assignment, I had to animate a swinging pendulum that was put in motion, and take that motion into account when making the arc of the pendulum's swings convincing. I ended up combining my scenario with a bit of knowledge carried over from the previous lesson. By attaching my pendulum to a ball that traveled on a rail, I could also showcase a bit of squash and stretch as the ball travels increasingly fast before colliding with the rail's end. (At one point, I was considering trying to add some stretch to the end of the pendulum as well, but I decided against it to save time.)

The fact that the object my pendulum was attached to didn't have a static shape introduced a lot of interesting questions. Where should I put the top end of the pendulum? Should the pendulum's string move vertically according to the squash and stretch as well? I ended up solving these problems by attaching the top part of the pendulum string to the center of the wire, and then erasing the parts that would cut through the wire or top on each frame. If you could view this scenario in 3 dimensions, maybe you could imagine the pendulum string coming from a hole underneath the wire clasp...

The actual process of animating the movement of the pendulum was relatively smooth, and a lot easier on the hands than the last assignment! Because of the structure of the assignment, I only needed to draw one line for the string and one circle for the bottom of the pendulum; every frame after that was just a matter of movement and rotation. It took a lot of fine tuning to get things to look good, and I ended up going back to adjust previous frames several times after rewatching it in motion, but I'm ultimately very happy with how this assignment came out.