Getting to were I am with 2D animation

To get to my last blog entry on my 2D walk I started with drawing and animating this simple looking ball.



I found this to be quite enjoyable to watch after all the drawings I had done. It looked a lot better then i thought it would.

I then went on to add some stretch and squash to the ball and this is what I came up with,



Adding the stretch and squash to the ball and slightly exaggerating it I found that it looked more life like as a bouncy ball.

After I got the hang of this I started to try and animate a more 'person' like object. using a box with arms and an oval as the head. first I made them jump from a height.



after this I added weight to the 'person' this adds more squash to the landing and a faster drop.



Moving on i made my character jump from one spot to another using anticipation and over lean.



after finishing this animated clip i found that one of the frames was incorrect, because of this it made it look like the 'person' on the jump up got hooked on something when on the way up. I found that taking out that frame made this a lot smother in watching. (this is the one with the miss placed frame)

After getting to grips with one character I moved on to have another in the frames that interacts with the other.



i found that after watching this animation that there should have been more frames in the beginning to add to the anticipation, the drawings needed to be clearer and that more stretch and squash would have made this animation work better. what i thought did work was that i tried to only animate one of the characters more at one point then the other. in doing this the viewer wont have to watch to things at once and gets all the details as to whats happening.

moving on i started to do walk cycles. adding legs to the boxed body was the easy part. making it look like the character was walking was a LOT harder then it looked. i knew it wasn't going to be easy i just didn't think it would have been THAT much harder.



I tried to draw it all as one lined person and found it not to my liking so changed my way of drawing it and just started with the legs to get the walking motion. i think after doing this that walk cycles are the hardest this to do so far in animation.

in this video i was trying to create a walk cycle that had a characteristic feel to it. to do this i recorded myself walking and then after watching it tried to re-draw it. i found this quite hard as when drawing you can not do it, one key frame to one paused frame of the video. i then found out after watching it that there was no body swing to it so tried again by adding more movement onto the body and head.


this is what i came up with. i find this style of animating very hard as i am more of a digital person. i find 2D drawing easy but getting it to move like this is alot harder then it looks.