Elements of the 12 Principles.

Through out my animation I have tried to incorporate different elements of the 12 principles of animation, to show that I now have an understanding of them and why they are used.

Squash and Stretch.

Just before the dragon lands, I have made the tail lift upwards and then slam down on the ground when he touches the floor. This is to give some indication that the tail is heavy, and I didn't want it to look still and although it isn't part of the dragon's body. I also kept it moving from time to time whilst the dragon was standing still, to help show that he is either happy and content, or not so much. 

Anticipation

Before the dragon blows fire, I made a point of making sure he inhales for a long time to give some indication of what is about to happen, and to make it a big deal. If the Dragon just blew the fire without bearing in deeply first, it wouldn't have the same effect. 

Exaggeration

When the characters are happy, I made the eyes suddenly larger to show the sudden change in emotion (also i thought it would add to the character appeal because it makes them look cute!)

Secondary Action

I though having the dragon suddenly blow smoke out of his nose would reinforce how angry and offended this character is, also it makes it slightly more comical. 

Putting it together.

I had each of my frames saved as JPEGS, so I could then go ahead and put them into sequence to check if they ran smoothly, which they did. When it came to adding colour I needed to have lots of separate layers which would only apply to the selected frames, to save time from colouring them all individually!

Some of the layers were only relevant for a certain group of frames so I needed to make sure they were all named correctly, however this did save a lot of time in the long run. 

When I was applying the colour digitally I wanted to try and make it seem more believable by adding  shading, to avoid the characters looking 2 Dimensional. I liked the fact that the backgrounds were hand drawn because it brought the characters forward from the mis-en-scene, which is was the effect I wanted to create. 

With large areas like this which only changed slightly, I was able to use the same layer for most of them. The only parts that needed altering for the close up of the dragon, was the smoke blowing out of the nostrils and the slanting of the eyelids to show anger. I thought this close up was pretty effective because up until this point, the dragon comes across as rather cute, so I wanted to show a sudden change in mood which might take people by surprise. 

When it came to adding colour to the fire, I knew from the beginning that no frame would be the same, so I decided to paint each one individually. However I was surprisingly chuffed with myself because it took no more than an hour and a half to get that all finished! 

Getting started..

For my animation I had planned to draw it digitally so I sketched out some of the key frames in pencil to scan in and use as reference. I did however create the backgrounds the traditional way with pencil crayon because I wanted the characters to look slightly separate from the Mis-en-scene. HOWEVER I was in a bit of a pickle at the beginning...

I had originally planned to duplicate this frame 24 times and just make the small alterations to each of them in order to animate it, however I realised I had made life so much harder for myself by having the background and the character on the same layer! 

So I went through the frames which I included the character and the background and quickly erased the background and rescanned those in separately. 

Having the backgrounds now separate made life so much easier as I was able to move the characters about separately and rub parts out with out effecting the background. 

Also because I knew the characters were going to be coloured later on I didn't need to overly worry about how they looked at this point, I just wanted to make sure the whole animation would run smoothly first. 

Feedback on my drawings!

After everybody looking at each others work and offering constructive criticism as well as things we have done well, I felt that I knew where I could have improved. I could have possibly done further experimentation with media as well as looked at a broader range of dance. However my character designs seem to have been liked by a lot of people, even though they made people cringe! I found this feedback really useful because its good to get an opinion from a fresh set of eyes!

Final Narrative

So in this strange, slightly heart rendering story we have a woman with wings who is taken to the circus and forced to dace for everybody else's entertainment. She is spotted by a fire breather who is part of the circus, who feels very sorry for her. Its all very sweet in the end and very "girl power". Lets just say she gives her a helping hand and helps create a diversion to set her free! Im really plased with this narrative because I really like the story because I think its quite out of the ordinary and strangely sweet. 

Welcome to the circus..

I carried out some research on different aspects of the circus which I knew I wanted to be incorporated into my story, because I wanted to get a better idea of how the environment was going to look.

I have previously done quite a lot of character designs which are quite melancholic and inspired by environments like the theatre and circus so I was really looking forward to creating my final story.

Further Development of drawings.

I have chosen this image to help me develop 8 more drawings. I knew I wanted to produce the same image again but play about with the colour and media but also let it give me some further ideas. After  choosing this drawing as my main inspiration I had the idea of going down the circus and performance route. 

I came up with a couple more potential characters for my final story board. I wanted my final story to be slightly strange and edgy, in the setting of a circus. I knew I wanted to use pencil crayon and marker pen as my main media because I think the colour plays a big part in the telling of the story. After producing these eight drawings I carried out some research on the circus, dance and all things creepy in that area really!

32 Completed

Here is my completed 32 drawings, some of them I am more pleased with than others, because I think some of them are quite experimental. I also tried interpreting different sounds too through drawing instead of just looking at the obvious aspects of people dancing. I also created some character based designs which incorporate words too, to try and get across the possible situations these people could be in.

Experimentation with different media

Through out the drawing process I tried to use a range of media such as pencil, fine liner, marker pens, watercolour and pencil crayon to try and give off different vibes and to see what worked best. I think some of my most successful drawings have been down with pencil crayon and fine liner, because they look quite vibrant. 

Some goofy stuff..

After doing quite a lot of observations of people around me on a daily basis, I realised how natural it is for people to dance around without even knowing it. This made me think more about the non professional side of dance, and how it is something we do for humour and fun. So I whipped out my camera.

Basically, I told these two to goof around and do what ever feels natural, I thought it would create something interesting to draw! 

Birds though.

I did some further research into different birds and how they attract one another through dancing. One of the man in things birds use to attract a mate is their feathers, so I thought it would be pretty cool to combine this with humans. Also it gave me the idea of looking at how couples dance together in a comedic way.

This is quite a graceful process for these animals so I wanted to produce some drawings focusing on fluidity, but also some more out of the ordinary images too. 

No, I must dance!

For my chosen word I went with "Dance". I chose this word because I have quite a lot of experience of dance and thought it would be really interesting to see what 32 images I could create based around this word. I started off by doing some research of different types of dance because I wanted to look at how different peoples bodies move in certain ways and how they express themselves through dance.

I was already aware that dance in itself is a very expressive thing, but I wanted to pay a lot of attention to the movements people go through, especially in ballet and contemporary which consist of a lot of elongation of the limbs. Although this seems like quite an obvious one, I still wanted to produce some drawings focusing on this sort of thing, looking mainly at how people can move themselves. 

I have always had a particular interest in ballet because it is something I have done since I was small, so I wanted to also focus on the less "pretty" side of it in order to create some some quite strange drawings.