As per Phil's advice during the Premise crit I have spent the past few days practising 2D animation with a turnaround animation of the present Graeme. I really want to practice a lot with 2D animation because I want to overlay this on top of the CG animation to give it a more scratchy, sketchy feel as I think it could add some nice dimension and texture to the film. This animation definitely needs more work - it's pretty clunky in parts - His hands are too small in some frames and the hair is challenging as the wavy parts need to match in all drawings to make it flow nicely. The feet were really difficult to understand in 3D so drawing a simple circle underneath the character really helped with animating them. I also had to edit a lot of my original static turnaround drawings as they did not animate well when overlaid on top of each other, I also need to do more in between keys and I am going to continue with this and add in more details such as a blink to really finesse it. If all goes well with 3D modelling I think it could look interesting to have a 3D turnaround showing the pipeline but also a 2D turnaround possibly meshed together.
I do feel a lot more comfortable using Photoshop rather than flash and following the video below by adding simple actions really equipped photoshop to be used as a useful animation tool. I am currently reading the book "Elemental Magic, The Art of Special Effects Animation" which is extremely useful and is teaching me a lot that I could incorporate into 2D animation such as smoke effects. I want to get to a place where I can work a lot more efficiently in 2D as this took way to long to accomplish, I do feel like I will get there slowly but surely. In the future I would like to animate small little snippets of lines from the script recording to match the different ideas that I have for the animation, keeping in mind the feedback of amping up the exaggeration. I am excited to learn more about 2D animation and I am thoroughly enjoying the process thus far.
