2D hand drawn animation

Another part of my final film is 2D hand drawn frame by frame animation. These scenes are in the beginning of the short film and at the very end with the paper animation and claymation in-between. As you can imagine I have been drawing a lot. And loving it, I have been drawing ever since I could hold a pencil and am really enjoying animating this way.

Animating this way is bringing a drawing to life, its spectacular when you can start drawing and draw bit by bit then play it and your character has come to life! It’s an amazing feeling, especially when it looks good.

For me I sometimes get frustrated when it doesn’t look the way I hoped it would but at that point I usually need to take a break and come back to it to either fix or change it. So far I have many scene that I really love and feel like I have animated to be best of my ability for this style.  And of course there are others which I think I will change later.  

My character Emily is simple in a way that she is very cartoony, for example she has a simple round face with a hair style that is easy to manipulate through drawing. I made her hands like mittens so that I don’t have to worry about fingers. Besides that though she is built like a regular human except that she is a bit short in the legs (I felt she looked better that way.)

Motka is a fun character to this film, he is a bit of comic relief and just that little background character you can’t help but love. I am really enjoying animating him, and every time he is in a scene he is doing his own thing in a very cute way. Motka is a very stylized character as well, it was fun making him a fluffy short cat and the way he is stylized has made it easier to animate. For example the way he sits I have made it that you can’t see all the things you usually see when a cat sits such as his back legs though it’s obvious that he is sitting.

The fairy-god-mother is mysterious and beautiful; I really enjoyed animating her as I have been able to make her more flexible when it comes to animating as she is a fairy. For example when she appears she comes out of a star and has magic swirly dust at the bottom of her robe. The fairy is also realistic and far more realistic than Emily.

I am just about to animate the other characters such as the old lady and the other homeless people. They are a similar style to Emily and they don’t move all that much in the scene so there isn’t anything to tricky happening there.  

The hardest scenes have been animated and turned out not being as difficult to animate as I had assumed. I plan on having all the rough draft animating done by the 24^th of August, which is when the production draft is due. That way all I need to do is finalize the animating add in the colour and all the details. Also this way my sound guy, Josh, will have all the information he needs to start putting sounds and music together.