Sting animation

ok erm i think this is where i write my blog. Never wrote a blog before so bare with me, its prob gonna turn out too formal.

to begin the project me and jack looked at his animatic. we used its simple design to come up with the basis of the layout for the project. After placing the animatic template into Adobe Flash i began to draw over jacks initial idea to give it a cleaner more vector looking style.

Animatic
Flash

Whilst i was creating the interior of the tram Jack began to design the buildings that would move by as the tram was in motion

Using photoshop he came up with this simple design that i would once again place into flash and use to create a sleek vector copy
Photoshop
Flash

Up next was the characters. we decided on choosing 2 characters each to design and animate. i chose the business man and the main character since there would be more animation involved and i was the most experienced with using Flash.

i created the characters simply by drawing stick figures and building upon them. This meant that i could easily animate the characters and position them in any pose i could think of.

here are the two characters i came up with.



Animating these characters was rather easy since they were silhouettes. Once and arm or a leg merged with another part of the body i no longer needed to draw it. This added greatly the efficiency of my work. Even rather complex animations such as the business man getting on the seat or the main character riving in pain became quite simple to draw. Although this does mean that some actions could be lost in the bodies of the characters. To avoid this i would hope to have highlights drawn on the characters as if the sunset from outside is providing just enough light to make out the shape of their limbs. Maybe this could be attained before the final show.

the final touches that i added to the project were slight facial animations on my characters to give them a but more emotion (especially the main character). u may notice that the business man gives the fat woman a hacky look when she nudges into him while sitting down. or the looks he gives the main character when he farts in the end.


one thing that i would really hope to have completed by the end of year show would be moving shadows from the sunset shining through the tram window. I started creating some shadows for the business man but it soon began to eat up what time i had left, so it was left out of the hand in work.



Robert Allman