Summer Work
Zelda Dance
After 2nd year ended; it was onto animating tests for my portfolio in the third year the only problem was my new job at Adidas. This was clearly apparent went I started my first animation of princess Zelda. My job to 3-5 days of my time each week so you can image how much time I have to myself and my own work but I did by in the end. In June/July I entered an animated music festival competition on Instagram called The Big Jig run by Seed Animation Studio. The brief was to animate any character dancing with 4 seconds with their selected audio. Their favourite animations would be featured in their top animations at the end of the event. Recently a sequel trailer came out of the game called Zelda Breath of the Wild and the new design of Zelda inspired me to animate her dancing towards this animation event. Before I started I did a concept art piece of what she’ll look like fully coloured in the background using references from the games trailer and other fan art pieces I found on the internet. I made the design really simple as possible due to the amount the details the original character had so that it was easier for me to animate.
At the same time I was also inspired by another game called Cadence of Hyrule; a rhythm based action game where you groove your attacks in sync of the music for victory. Zelda’s sprite dance animation is what I used mainly for reference for the dance I animated Zelda. I found it hard to imitate the dance in person and it was difficult finding references online that matched it but I found one Gif that kind of captures the dance of the animation sprite from the game. This sprite was a looped dance and as was mine which saved me time in the amount of frames I had to draw in 4 seconds.
When I was animating I went through many trail and errors in the motion of the dance. On one side; I had subtle movement and the other exaggerated movement in the dance move. Although they were just key frames at the time; I asked for feedback from friends and teachers weather they liked the subtle movement or the exaggerated movement. Nearly everyone liked the exaggerated one and so I continued with that version through the inbetweening. Here’s a process video through every stage of animation starting from key frames to final piece.
The main problem of this animation was the multiple assets the character had and how many of it I had to animate. Some assets lost its volume such as the brown belt and sleeves. One other thing; the feet were stationed because of the sprite reference. I tried to animate the feet but it looked awkward with the rest of the movement, so I stayed true to the reference I had even though it was just a sprite and some references similar to it. Other than that I was pretty satisfied with this piece as I enjoyed animating the extreme overlapping animation on every part of the character mainly the ears flopping about because it seemed funny to me whenever I look back at the animation.
2D Coat Animation
In August to September the next piece of animation tests was the 2D coat animation over a 3D character. I was always fascinated with 3D and 2D mixing together it always takes back to the movie of Space Jam. I was collaborating with my colleague friend Liam who is a 3D animator and he animated the 3D character rig using his own reference of putting a coat on. He then sent the 3D render over to me in which I imported into Clip Studio Paint. Liam also kindly gave me the exact position of each extreme and key pose of the 3D animation. This was for me to place each key frame and extreme of the coat would be and look like while also using Liam’s reference video. This made things a lot easier to navigate and inbetween.
Over summer this piece of animation defiantly took me out of my comfort zone, which is why this piece took most of my summer to do. The reason why is because I had to animate everything on 1s in 24fps because the render was rendered out that way. This took the process a lot longer than usual not to mention my job was getting in the way too. Other than that I was satisfied of the result and how it turned out. One thing to note: the reference for this was really important and good to follow as I was able to capture the shape of the coat in each frame of the video and translate/reference it over by drawing it in 2D. Without it I feel like I’d lose the volume, shape and size of the coat for the character. It reminded how powerful reference is for animation; because I was surprised of how well it turned out. I started to understand the work flows put in for the mixture 2D and 3D especially in key framing and extremes. Sadly, I wasn’t able to shade it as I had to move on to the next animation test because summer was almost over.