Friday 29 November 2013

Week 1

Today I started working on my loop animation for the presentation that will take place in a month, I don't really have any idea of what i want to make, all i know is that it has to be a pixelated GIF.

I got some ideas down for what i would like to show everyone, i wanted it to be something that represented me in a way that tells everyone that I'm good at both animation and visuals. So I got inspiration from another game (street fighter) due to the catchy phrase for one of the moves; 'Hadouken', however that doesn't really show the character moving around, so I decided to do another move from that game, 'shoryuken' which is an upper cut.

I didn't want to spend too long on this so i didn't add too much detail into the character, i thought that was unnecessary. I wanted it to be simple because i knew, i would have to draw it frame by frame. If it was too complex then it would take more than one week.

My design looks like a sphere/oval with little circles for hands and feet. It's simple but you can still show movement with the hands and feet. I didn't really think about the colour when i started this but, after i was done drawing each frame I went in and add different shades of grey to make it seem more 3d/ give more depth.

Before adding the victim who gets punched, I animated the punch for 24 frames with a 0.1 frame delay, this would make sure that each frame is visible but not too slow. I just animated the motion of the uppercut with no effects (the blue glow and the blood or the victim), after that process was done I went and added neon blue glow and streaks to the hand as the punch was being unleashed, then I wanted a victim and so I made him stand out by giving him a bright yellow with shade and red spikes. I animated the victim to walk up and get hit just at the right time, I spent even less time on this second character because he would only be in the scene to get punched.
After I was done with the characters, I wanted to do a simple background because currently it was on a white background and it didn't look finished, also I wanted to show that I can do a bit of backgrounds as well so I decided to draw in some trees and clouds. Finally I went and colour corrected everything, added blurs where they were needed for example the streaks of the upper cut and the glow of the sky, clouds and the shadow near the tree trunks.
I was mostly proud of this GIF, considering the amount of time I spent on it.