🌸 Sem 2, Week 5: Working from Reference

 For week 5 we were tasked with working from reference.

I started out by browsing an online library of different actions until I found one I was happy with. Following that I spent some time analysing the movement and after sketched out very rough keyframes. After I also quickly sketched in some quick in-betweens.

Originally I was planning to animate a stylised human character however I decided against it in order to work with a slightly different body structure and get a chance to experiment a bit. I used a random animal generator in to pick some potential animal characters I could animate and in the end I settled on a sphynx cat and a jerboa. 

I did some sketches for both and even started animating the jerboa however I found the long legs to be a little too tricky to work with for this action so I decided to focus on the sphynx instead although I am hoping to reuse the character sketches in the future. 

At first I found it a little bit difficult to work with the cats body as the proportions were quite different from a human however eventually I managed to make it look the way I want. Alongside animating the main body I had to think about the tail and large floppy ears. I left the tail as a simple line to make it a bit easier to animate however I think that in the end it ended up working very well for the character. Animating the ears at first was quite difficult however after experimenting a bit I managed to get them to move how I wanted. I thought that the ears flopping would not only add more character to but also make the cat more lively overall.

Overall I think the final animation turned out quite good however there are definitely a lot of things that could be improved. If I had to remake this animation I would focus more on the ears as sometimes their movement looks a bit odd. Alongside this I would pay more attention to the timing as I feel that at some parts the character is moving a bit too fast.