OUIL504 Illustration 1 Moving Pictures - Drawn Animation

Moving on from the previous task, our aim now was to create a Drawn Animation of a least 60 frames. Continuing off the back off what I'd done in the Dragon Frame workshops, I aimed to carry on making stuff based around the fact that only a small amount of people control a majority of the world's wealth and resources. I thought if you used money as literal food - kind of like what PES does in a lot of their animations. the concept would be a lot more understandable. 

Heres a quick breakdown/storyboard of what I wanted to happen with my animation:

The animation itself was made using a Graphics Tablet in Photoshop, exported and saved as an MP4 H.1624 file, suitable for upload online. I wanted to try drawing it by hand on paper and incorporating other bits of media into it with After Effects, however crowding on the lightboxes meant this was infeasible and I wouldn't have got it completed in time had that been the case. I hope to try animating in this way in the future

The process of creating frame-based animation in photoshop is really simple, which makes animating really stress free and a pretty enjoyable if-not time consuming process. You simply create a frame based timeline, draw a layer, duplicate the frame, draw another layer - switching the visability of the layers on and off depending on what you want seen on the stage.

Whats also really cool is that you can make say, 4 or 5 layers, then re-use them in reverse to create certain cycles of things like blinking, for example. 

The end result came to about 61-62 frames - I cut out the end scene purely to keep it within the 60-frame margin, but its something I will most likely finish off later.

I also really want to try adding stuff like backgrounds and colour to this, given the simple nature of it. I feel like although I need to practice movement a lot more, since some of the gestures (such as the sighing) look a little stiff, I feel technically pretty competent at animating this way. I'd like to attempt approaching a mixed-media way of working, maybe mixing some analogous collage with the drawn animation? Time will tell! Fairly satisfied with the outcome of this though.