After weeks of work I've finally reached the end of the road for this animation. I am satisfied with what I ended up with, but due to some last minute problems and time restraints I couldn't complete the flying part. I find it a little sad that I put so much work into the sky and the colours but couldn't execute it at all. That said everything leading up to that point - I have stayed true to the original idea and sketch, honestly the flying part was something extra that I wanted to do but even without it my animation is still a very smooth transformation which I am very happy about. Now that the main things are out of the way I will start with the small details.
At the start of the animation the I was a little confused about the character that I was given - it seemed to me, a little hard to animate a character who didn’t have much of a transformation other than expression and a small clothing change. However after asking the around the group I was assigned and talking to the teacher I decided to make the main character Riverford, the snake who transforms into a dragon from eating the drawings of Scarlet instead of destroying the forest and town by eating them. I got this idea a few days after we received the character packs and before then I analyzed the character package like crazy but I realise now that everything I researched was about Scarlet and nothing about Riverford because there was basically not information about him at all in the character pack. Because I didn’t do the research before hand I did it during cleanup - googling snake heads in varying directions such as front, side and open mouthed. I also had to research the movement of snakes and how their scales would behave while moving as my attempts of this without the study proved to look stiff and unnatural. During the sketch I drew out beforehand where I wanted the snake to be and its position.
From the first moment I started thinking of all the animations I could do with a colour eating snake and an artist girl - the idea of Scarlet throwing a paper into the air while Riverford snaps it up was something that just… stuck with me. I considered other ideas of course but I really did like my original idea so that is what I started to do. Some other ideas that came to my head are this:
- Scarlet drawing on her notepad, the camera is in a bird eye view and zooms into the drawing. As it zooms out again Scarlet’s straps around down and she is looking more confident.
- Scarlet would throw paper in the air while the ‘buttons’ of the overall will pop off and will stand there beaming.
- Riverford and Scarlet sitting underneath a tree, he goes and eats her notebook while transforming. They look happy at the end.
When I first started designing the snake, the first thing that came to mind was paint-like wings created from the colour that he will eat from Scarlet to transform. The main feature that I was inspired by was Lapis Lazuli's wings, a character from the popular TV show Steven Universe. I watched many videos on the physics of those wings, how they moved - and even she had a transformation scene where they spread from her back. Unfortunately I discovered around the same time that the original creator had also designed a dragon transformation for Riverford, not included in her character pack but on her blog instead. I went up to ask her if I could use my design instead and she agreed that it was fine so I went ahead and did that.
The colour scheme was the fun part. Because of the colour eating theme, it gave me complete freedom for what I could use and I took full advantage of it. To be honest I didn’t consider many other colours I just gravitated towards purple and yellow. This may seem odd but looking back on it now I can see it is because I have a character of my own I created that has a very similar feeling towards it and I wanted to pay homage to that character, he also happens to be my blog icon! During the colouring phase I had a lot of trouble getting the colours right for the pre-transformation Riverford. Firstly line colour and secondly the transparent colour itself. I asked some of my friends what they thought of what I came up with but they had comments such as:
This really helped me out and I settled with a kind of matte colour that had a purple/orange overlay but it wasn’t extremely damaging to the eyes. Also while in after effects I did the colour differently because I had to work with transparency. First I had a PNG sequence of the snake moving, but set the layer type to Hard Light. Then underneath I had a second PNG sequence that was exactly the same but this one I set to multiply. This gave the effect of the hard light that I loved but it wasn’t too bright or transparent for the eyes. I also played around with the outer glow and opacity of the snake.
Some colour variations, I decided to go with the pink colour.
During cleanup I realised that the snake I originally sketched up was a little, different, to what an actual snake and the reference looked like so some major surgery had to happen there - this made time management a little more difficult than planned but it didn’t stop there everything after the turn was also very different. The head size was too large and face was not in proportion I believe that I could have managed my time a lot better - I really ran out of time and couldn’t finish the assignment completely. Some other problems that I faced while cleaning up was getting the head shape right - the original sketch was just a circle with a snout attached to it but after studying snake anatomy closer I realised that it is much more complicated. There was supposed to be bumps where the eyes were, a sharper more square snout and because I had to clean up the horns I had to change the head shape to show that they were growing there.
My background was no trouble at all - after looking at a lot of forest inspirations I started to sketch out layouts that I would be happy with. The first one I came out with was not good to say the least so I was much happier with the second one that turned out to eventually become my final. For a style I wanted to do a sort of 2D storybook feeling and after my classmate allowed me to use one of her background from a game she was making everything came together very easily.
I’m pretty happy about my blog posts, I wrote a pretty standard entry every time I blogged explaining exactly what I did that day and the research I did. I found out that I find it kind of relaxing to just talk about what I did and explaining stuff - I believe this is an improvement to the start of the year where I barely posted anything at all, and when I did it wasn’t very descriptive and just gif updates with no context. As an animator I feel like I’ve learned a lot and definitely am proud of myself for what I achieved. Again I still regret not being able to finish the flying arc in the animation - I definitely bit off much more than I could chew where I spent too much time focusing on correcting the smaller details such as the linework and colours where I could have put that time into completing the flying. I feel like I appreciate animation a lot more now, when I’m watching shows and complicated animation happens in 6 or more seconds I always think, “Damn. That would have taken me more than a month to do.”
I would also like that thank the teacher that made all this possible, Dane Jacobs, for being super helpful and just giving me all sorts of advice and tips that I couldn’t have learned from home - some days when I was struggling with certain parts of the animation this teacher solved problems for me in a flash - this is regarding things such as timing charts of the snake movements and the eye opening sequence. On my own they looked ok, but with the advice taken from the teacher I made them a lot better.
Overall I think that I am pretty satisfied with how this turned out. Yes I could have done a lot better but this being my second time animating something so complicated in my life I think I have done well. I realised that I waste too much time on smaller details when there are much bigger things I should be doing and I think in the future I will try to focus on this to really create a better animation.
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