WEEK 2: Field Guide

  Week 2 introduced the idea of the Field guide. When doing traditional animation people use a field guide to mark which part of the paper is going to get shot and recorded. Although I don't do traditional hand drawn animation I wanted to have a go at doing it and there is an aspect of rigging the camera in some forms of digital animation.

I decided the concept of my GIF would be the opening and closing of a curtain. My process digitially is quite alot different from how I approached this project. I'm sure there are ways of doing roughs and thumbnails in traditional but because the movemnt and design weren't complicated I felt comfortable just going in and started drawing after doing a frame plan.

Here is my frame plan for the GIF. To make it an infinite loop I made sure to put the key movements at opposing frames so there were equal frames for movement on both sides. I then marked where the mid frames would be so the inbetweens would be easier to map out. I first drew the outlines for the 1st and 7th frame then worked to the inbetweens segmenting it so I could properly see and draw over the previous layers.

Here is my final Gif sequence.

Although it is not that complex I am happy that the movement looks fluid because unlike using digital animation its very hard to play through your pre-drawn frames to check realistic movement. If I would go back and change anything it would be the block shading of the black ink because it does look patchy in places due to the different strengths of the ink I used.

It's worth mentioning that during development I also played with the idea of doing the transition from night to day and made some tester imagery. In the end I realised that the movement was too fast for a short GIF and changed concepts to the one above. (see below the GIFs produced)