Applied Animation: Making a Start on Animating

In our last meeting we had divided up the storyboard between the three of us, myself and Wing having three storyboard pages each out of the seven, as Oscar is going to take charge of post-production, or at least the majority of it. Because we were happy with how the work load had been divided, and because there were no immediate issues that were pointed out to us in our second interim critique, I could get started.

Stamp Scene

I chose to work on the stamp scene first as I thought this was going to be the hardest to draw, and it would have been nice to get it out of the way. To get started, I took a quick recording of myself extending my arm past the camera and placing down a square piece of paper on the table, so I could use it as reference. I found this extremely useful as it helped me to get the perspective right on the arm, and it allowed me to see how the arm would 'get smaller' as it got further away from the camera.

Using my reference as a guide, I marked out the path that the stamp was going to take on a frame that had a 16x9 frame marked out, and from there I was able to work out timings and draw out my keyframes. In the past, I've never really done this, instead I tended to mark out the timings and just animated straight-ahead. I found this process to be much easier and it is going to be something I continue to do; I don't know why I didn't do it before as this method allowed for me to add the necessary amount of in-betweens and it helped to keep volume consistent. 

I'm really happy with the start that I have made. I think the hand movements are smooth and I like that the easing helps create the illusion that the hand is getting further away. The background still needs to be animated, and it needs to be edited so that it doesn't show through the arm and components that lie on top of it, but I shall do this at a later date once my other scenes are completed as I figure this to be more important.