Surprise Cleanup

I cleaned up the surprise animation, adding in his ears and hair waving at the start to lengthen it out a bit, as it was rather short.

Running Man Cleanup

I added structure to the running man, not changing much with the animation as I was rather satisfied with how the body moved. Finally, I roughly sketched on a quick background, just to give it a bit more detail.

Three Rough Animations

Wanting to get back into animation I did a few rough sketches. I didn't spend too long on each - about an hour each for the first two and then ten minutes for the third one. I wanted to just rough out some animation instead of worrying over details and being a perfectionist.

Third Year Film Character Designs

I designed the cat for my film, basing it on a Russian Blue (though rather over-exaggerated with the fur colour). I've tried to keep the style rather cartoony and western, as I would like my film to be a kind of homage to old cartoons.

I started off by sketching out a few styles. I decided that I preferred the bottom-left cat and so added the body and coloured it. I may come back and edit the design a bit later after planning my potential film out some more.

My coursemate who I designed the squirrel for designed the man for my third year film, which you can see here- http://2dshaz.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/helping-on-another-film.html

Third Year Film Idea

I came up with a concept of a potential third year film. I would like to go about planning this and if it becomes too much work I will simplify the idea.

The two characters are a man and his cat, and the film is about the man trying to take his cats to the vets. The problem arises when the cat refuses to get inside the cat carrier, and so the man repeatedly comes up with crazier and crazier ideas to get the cat into the carrier so that it can be taken to the vets. 

The good thing about this idea, I think, is that I can vary the amount of methods the man uses to try and get the cat into the carrier. If I find there's too much work I can just take one of the scenes out.

I want to do some of the planning before summer (mostly character design and starting the storyboarding) but plan on doing a big chunk of the work over the summer. I want to have at least some of the animation done before I come back to University.

Squirrel Turnaround

Finally, I drew a turnaround for the squirrel character.

Character Design

I am planning on animating a squirrel in Shaz's 3rd year film so I sketched out a few squirrel designs for her in different styles.

Here's the final squirrel design in the tentative style of the 3rd year film.

Layout Sketches

I started painting some layouts. I started with thumbnail sketches before blocking out the basic shapes and setting my colour-schemes.

Lip-Sync 2 Storyboard

I don't plan on animating this one as I want to push forward with different types of animation, not just lip-syncs (though I might revisit it at the end if I have time).

I designed the two characters after finding my voice clip, deciding to base them on pigeons. I wanted to have a go at drawing wings as hands, as it's something I've never done before.

This first one is based on a stereotypical Mafia boss: old and big-chinned with a very confident but cool demeanour.

The second one, as an underling, I tried to make look rather thin and straggly. 

I had them sitting down (as there is the sound of a chair scrape in the audio) and so focused on facial expressions and hand movements. 

More Animation

I finished animating my lip-sync animation. There are a few things that need editing such as in the middle, getting rid of the pause and how the male rodent does not react when the female talks to him. I will come back to this later as I want to get a few more smaller animation pieces done.