Transformation Animation

When we were given the transformation animation brief way back at the beginning of term (seems like a life time ago) I was really excited as animation is something I’ve always been fascinated with and have experimented with over the years. I always admired the great animators of Disney and Warner Brothers who’s work seems effortless, but full of movement and expression and took great skill and planning to execute correctly.

When I read the brief I had ideas of an animation, which would morph from one character to another and loop back to the beginning. I know what I want to do with animation but sometimes it takes me a while to work things out and so I did a few experiments to test out the ideas I had.

The first test I did was done in Flash and was just a bit of a mess about to see how I could change one character into another. It runs a bit fast and jerky, but as a quick test I found it useful to figure out how to make things morph.

The second test was to morph some of my sketchbook characters together and I actually started drawing this one up but couldn't work out a way to get back to the first character and ditched it. I wish I’d stuck with it as it was looking really nice.

The 3rd and final test was a rough I did for the finished piece, I was really happy with the smoothness of the transitions and learnt though the previous tests to add more frames to make things flow smoothly.

(I fully intended to post up the 3 tests, but can't figure out how to convert a flash file for web)

Final animation

I decided to go all retro and hand draw it using a lightbox hence the wobbles and specks of ink that pop up here and there. I’m planning to draw the frames again in illustrator ready for the end of year show but am thinking I might just have the rolling heads bit only with more character transitions.