Balloon - Apply

Balloon from Bex on Vimeo.

we were asked to create a final animation using of of the skills we had learnt during the animation skills brief. we were asked to create a 5-10 second animation, or 20-30 seconds if dont using pixilation. the words we were asked to explore were: longing, hate, love, lateness, surprise, happiness,sadness or fear. I decided to go with sadness and happiness and how quickly it can change.

This was my first complete drawn animation, consisting of 60 frames and lasting 5 seconds. I found timing to be one of the hardest parts of this task, as working out the movements ended up being very difficult. It was a different idea to start with which i have explained in another post, but i went for having a small child with a balloon or an ice cream as my main character and have them loose the balloon or the ice cream falling on the floor.

I used some large sheets of paper to try and design and plan my character design for my child, which i ended up deciding would be a girl. I messed around with a few ideas playing with the different outfits she could wear and how she would look. once i had my head around that i story boarded my idea which was easy as it was such a simple idea. 

Originally i was going to colour her in, giving her a blue dress that changed to grey when she looses the balloon. but due to timing and not deciding how i would colour it i decided to just leave it as a line drawing and maybe leave the opportunity open to colour it in at a later date. 

I found animating this way hard and very time consuming, although it is definitely a technique i want to practice and hopefully grow at it. The way i went about timing it was mimicking the actions and taking photos of myself posing for the kew frames i planned to include in my animation. because i was not sure how many frames i needed exactly between the kew frames i did not number them until later, making it very hard to not get confused by it all. This worked for me as i could fill in the extra frames needed later using the kew frames as a guide to where they should go and how they should look. I then put the animation together using quicktime and later changed the colour to make it black and white rather then showing the red pencil used.