Getting My Feet Wet

After months and months of reading blog articles and books by masters in the industry, as well as listening to podcasts every day about animation, I couldn't handle it anymore. I had to play around with 2D animation.

So I downloaded a demo of FlipBook, a powerful program for doing 2D, and did a bouncing ball, but threw in an explosion. It took me about an hour:

There were a lot of issues. My timing was really bad, and the ball/bomb was shrinking as it progressed along. So, I knew I wanted to touch it up a lot. Ah-ha, but I also wanted to play around with some other principles, such as secondary action. So, I figured I turn the ball into a bomb with a burning fuse. Then I figured the bomb should come from somewhere, so I added cannon. Then I wanted to make more particle effects from the explosion. Then I wanted to make it so it could loop continuously.

So, 6 hours of my life later, I have my four and a half second animated clip. Enjoy:

More drawring.

Had fun at the drawing session over at Center Stage Gallery. Today we had a model dressed up as a cowboy...and man, he was pretty amazing. I wish I could have sat closer and just drawn his amazing face all day. So much character and personality.