2D Elephant Animation - All prep. work and final outcome

To see my final animation scroll down to the bottom of this blog post.
What follows is the process I went through to get there..

This exercise was to animate a change in emotion to practise our
performance in animation skills. The character would need to have a
scene objective and something would need to happen to obstruct/change
this objective; Leading to a change of emotion in the character.

Over the last couple of weeks I have spent a lot of time on this..
The idea has come directly from experience when I saw a funny situation
whilst working at the Elephant Nature Reserve, Chaing Mai in Thailand
in 2006.

Here is a photo from the actual event that happened. At the time it was
pretty funny..



When I got back from Thailand I made this rough comic documenting the
incident which I have somehow managed to keep up until now.



I started the project by drawing elephants..


I made a very rough scene plan of what would happen:



I used a lot of reference from my trip and sketched many elephants getting used to their shape and form.







Here I looked in The Animation Survival Kit by Richard Williams and took
some essential notes and drawings from the page about animating animals.



I was very pleased (and surprised) that Muybridge had taken 24 frames of an elephant walking! Thanks Muybridge you're a legend!



Here are 12 frames I drew from Muybridges work.



Here is a reference video I made which would dictate the main actions of
what was going to happen. It was pretty funny acting this one out especially
for Marcel who played the essential role of elephant.



From this I was able to put together a really good scene plan for the animation that shows all the main key frames and timing. I also took note of what the characters would be thinking.

An important part of this assignment was to make their thoughts obvious
through their body language and performance. This is because their thoughts dictate their actions. Next to the elephant I wrote down key notes for its movements pre-empting what would happen and describing the
actions/reactions it would take. This page was absoultly essential
when it came down to making the animation.



This shows the shapes that would form my main character..



Here is the first drawing in the animation. I then drew out all the key
frames on my lightbox working directly from my scene plan using the
volumes of the girl instead of the man.



Ultimately I had this in mind as a final look but unfortuantly I didn't get
enough time to make it all look like this:



When it came to animating the elephant, it was quite straightforward and fun using all the basic shapes as seen in my first drawing (2 images up.) The elephant run required a bit of thought and so I did these rough thumbnails taking the main key poses an elephant walking.



So after a fair bit of work here is my first rough animation. It was put
together in time for feedback on Thursday so has quite a handmade quality
to it. At this stage the movement of the elephant was very basic.



On thursday I showed this to the class and got a fairly positive response
and some constructive feedback. I then spent many hours working on a more complete version.

I added a few more important drawings to get more life into the elephant. Keeping feedback from Derek in mind - I spent a lot of time re-working the timing so that the reactions play off eachother ( the girl reacts to the elephant and vice versa - not both performing actions at the same time.) Derek also mentioned I could play with the volumes a bit more - it doesn't have to be so rigid. I will keep this in mind for future projects as I did not have the time to do it with this one.

I also got feedback from my girlfriend who mentioned that when the girl
does her chin wag she is facing upwards when she should be looking at the
elephant, she also mentioned how the elephants head should move - perhaps when it starts to get agitated. So I made these changes too.

I traced over all the drawings and filled them with colour. The final touch was
adding the grass texture which I have to say looks quite nice!

So without further ado here is my final animation:



Of course it is not completly complete. If I had more time I would add all
the inbetweens and make them look like proper characters. The girl would
have clothes etc. With the 11 second club looming up I must call it a day
on this project and start thinking about the next. Bring it on!

Technical note for future reference: I worked at 250 % in Flash with brush size 1.0. and the second brush shape down with 40 on the smoothing.