Week 5+6: Obstacle Course

For the last assignment we had to keep what we had learned earlier about weight in mind, and animate a figure moving through an obstacle course. I decided to animate a cat, both because I enjoy animating animals, and I though it could make it just a little more interesting and unique. The process here was pretty straight-forward. We looked at people and squirrels making their way across a variation of obstacles, which is where I took  lot of my inspiration from.

The first thing I did was make a layout, deciding what obstacles to use, how big they should be and where to place them. When I was happy and I had a layout I could realistically create an animation for, I made a nicer background with defined edges to make it easier to start animating. 

I animate from one angle only, from the side. I didn't make too much of an animation-plan, other than making marks to know where my cat would be jumping and landing, and the arcs it would follow as it jumps and/or falls. The rest I animated straight ahead, frame by frame. It's a little frightening to animate like this as it can be hard to know if you're going where you want, but in this case it gave the animation a nice dynamic and spontaneous aesthetic. I was happy so far, and kept going until I had a whole sequence. 

Because of time constraints I decided to skip the bottom level and just fill the end-drop with fish to make a decent ending. It still ended up being 28 seconds, which I'm quite pleased with. I'm the most happy with the last jump, where it spins through the air before dropping into the pool of fish. I think this specific movement ended up looking nice mostly because I was drawing the frames straight ahead.

It's a simple design and the line-quality looks a bit crude, but I'm really pleased about the movement and timing of this animation.