ANIMATIC

From there I had to create a an animatic and a style frame. I first made the animatic. Without a storyboard I immediately had to think of a concept and animate. I first thought what made me uncontrollably livid. I immediately thought of the classic situation of stubbing your toe. When stubbing my toe, I get unnecessarily livid, to the point where I can’t even form words, and I direct towards the thing I stubbed my toe on. It seems even more ridiculously as I was the one who could’ve prevented it, but there I am getting mad at an inanimate object that I probably put there. With all of that in mind I thought that situation was the perfect way to depict the word ‘livid’.

With the concept hammered down I started to create the animatic. I had no idea how I was going to animate the project, or what the characters and scene would look like, so I had to be very general. I started to create the animation in Adobe Photoshop. In order to speed up the animation process I utilized the AnimDesign2 which gives similar tools as Adobe Animate. I then quickly animated frame by frame and created an animatic of a person stubbing their toe and getting violently livid. When deciding how to depict the climax of the anger I decided to use the classic depicts of a work whistle. It’s literally someone going over the top which I think fits the word ‘livid’. I initially wanted to include the aspect of a person getting unnecessarily angry at an inanimate object, so I animated the person throwing the rock after the climax which would then allow the animation to loop.

STYLE FRAME

I then had to develop a style frame, style a singular frame of the animation to set the style for the rest of the development process. I decided that this would be a 2D animation and to go with a style with minimal geometry and defining lines with a hand drawn effect on the lines. I styled the character in a way which accentuate their legs to make for a more dynamic walk cycle.

ANIMATING

With everything figured out I move on to the final animation. I first recreated my style frame in Adobe Illustrator. In order to better animate the walk cycle I made the each leg out of a single stroke with a heavy line weight. I separated the backdrop, ground, and each limb of the character such as the legs, arm hair, head, etc. I then exported the Ai file with the separated assets in Adobe After Effects. I then created shape layers out of the Illustrator layers to easily animate. After that I started animating the first scene in the composition. I animated the walk cycle by moving the strokes and shapes individually. I animated that way and created compositions for each scene. The walk cycle, the foot hitting the rock, jumping up and down, breathing, fist clenching, and the work whistle. The emulate a slow motion effect when the foot hit the rock. I just created about 5 shots of the foot each getting closer to the rock. I then separated the shots with 3 frames in between each and made them fade in and out. I added an effect to the fist clenching scene to make the screen shake and increased in as the shot progresses. For the final shot of the animation, I had the work whistle as its own shape and the head as it’s own shape. I laid the 2 shapes on top of each other. I then first created a keyframe where the work whistle is normal and then created a keyframe edited the paths of the work whistle the somewhat fit the shape of the head and then changed the color to the head colors. I then did the same thing for the head but instead made paths fit the shape of the work whistle. Then by speeding up the animation the morph seems seamless.