DigitaLeon Illustrations

Well, back again in full force, well, kinda. Here's a short animation I did in a previous class, advanced animation principles. It was a very fun class actually, learned a lot of new things on animation, like how to really get the feeling of weight in an animation. I also improve a bit more on the timing of movements in an animation.

A short animation I did in Flash, I haven't used flash before this, for years. So when the class was oriented around using Flash, I was pretty excited to be able to use it again. We had to break up the characters into different parts, like arms, legs, torso, head, etc, and animate the different parts using motion tweens, and in some cases frame-by-frame. The backgrounds were painted in photoshop, and imported into Flash.

Now this is the final composition for another class. Compositing is a very powerful tool, and if used wisely, there's truly no limit to what could be created. I used a few clips here and there, and the challenge was to add effects into them. They were comprised of mostly either 2D or 3D elements, composited into the individual clips, and then the clips were edited together.

If you've been in any math class, I'm sure you'd remember the grid were you plot points, X coordinates go left and right, Y, goes up and down. Then, there's the Z, which goes toward and away from you. So the challenge of this project was to create the feeling of depth in an environment. As if you were traveling into it, I of course, opted to paint all of the visuals myself in photoshop for necessary practice, because I could have used images from the internet instead. I wanted to give the feeling of going into another world, from a room with a broken wall, into a lush forest which leads to temple deep within. I really like how this turned out, and I'd definitely use something like this in any animated series that I'd do, because it truly creates the feeling of depth in the environment. To push it even further, I could have animated elements layered and really broaden the horizons.

Here's the completed walk cycle, and also a background I painted in photoshop to add into the project. You know, it's always great to have the character's environment to be clearly defined. Having the environment clearly defined, really brings a new element of life and depth into any animation. The quality of my animation has surely improved, I remember the first walk cycle I had to do and it was okay at the time. However, it was very jittery and inconsistent, this one, is so much more consistent and I kind of like the result. 

Here's a new walk cycle done for digital ink and paint. It's still kind of rough, but much better than the last attempt. At some point I want to add the inbetweens so that the motion is a lot more smoother than were it's at now. Next I've got to make a background and have the walk cycle play over a panning background. So that should be fun. Another short animation for the same course! A head turn, I did this before the walk cycle and it was earlier in the course. Seeing it now, there's a lot of things about it I would definitely fix and do it again.