Dynamic Character Animation Test

 Dynamic Character Animation Test

Making a few animations that don't add up to half a dozen frames, or some quick takes and expressions is all well and good, but I thought it was about time I should attempt some really dynamic animation using a character.

I had this idea during my R&D project but couldn't justify doing it due to time constraints, but I wanted to animated my character 'Pix' doing some slick skateboarding and parkour using frame by frame animation.

Now unfortunately, my anatomy and drawing skills at the time of writing aren't that great, so I to heavily reference this work both in motion and style, using a real video of a skateboarder, and borrowing heavily from the artstyle of artist Marie Lum to create my character again.

Process

Before I even started, I knew what the challenge was gonna be for this animation. Drawing the frames themselves. If there's something I've discovered in my first year as an animator, it's that my strengths lie in grasping theory and being able to understand why and how things work. I understand those 12 principles completely, I can see in my minds eye how to properly exaggerate my characters, I feel like I have truly unique characters and scenarios in my head, but when the pen meets pad, there's just a very quiet raspberry blow.

With all this in mind, I knew that heavy reference was going to be my crutch. The concept of the animation was interesting enough to me that I felt it'd be visually interesting to watch - Pix leaps off her skateboard, hops over a box, and lands back on her skateboard as it continues to roll at the bottom of shot.

I created some pages that showed my lines of action (for both Pix and the skateboard), as well as some very loose gesture poses. My initial concept had Pix use her wings as a boost rather than her foot, but the anatomical nightmare of fairy wings proved too taxing that evening.

To create these gestures, I used a frame by frame online skateboarding tutorial, showing clear body movements of the model and board in profile. Now, my mistake at the time of drawing was trying to replicate this models body shape directly in my gestures, which due to his extremely baggy clothing and poor silhouette, looked very shoddy indeed. Now that I've done more gesture drawing at time of writing, I'd look to modify the perspective of the rider slightly, as well as using key points of anatomy to inform my gesture instead of the model's outline.

All of that taken into account though, I had my guide of how I would produce my frames, so the next step was to take them all into photoshop and get properly drawing.

Now there's obviously quite a huge difference between a late 20's male skateboarder and a 4 foot tall punk fairy girl, so just using the gestures as they were wouldn't fly. Instead, I looked to Marie Lum's artwork for inspiration and guidance on the anatomy of shorter characters, mainly young girls. I then did my best to adapt her anatomy onto my gestures, to mixed results. Some of the frames I'm very happy with, some are shocking, but fortunately I don't think it's too noticable at full speeds.

Illustration by Marie Lum

Once I'd drawn all my frames, I yet again used photoshops timeline feature to compile them in order, and adjusted frame timings to improve the overall timing of my piece. I then exported it as a GIF, and it was done!

The finished animation really isn't too bad, I'm happy how it turned out (which is good because I worked on it for far too long due to restarting multiple times), but I know what to do going forward. As I said a little earlier, I wasn't knee deep into studying gesture at this time, and even now after only a couple of weeks, I can see a ton of things I'd do differently. I just need to work on improving my gesture and anatomy skills and animations like this one should look even better!!!!!