Silhouettes of Characters and animations

In this task I set out to begin to think of my character in an animated sense, so I looked at my character and created a simple silhouette and then began to animate them by hand. Much like how South Park was made in its early days. The reason why I set out to do this task, is to gain a better understanding of animation and how my character would react in certain situations. In this case I wanted to see how my Leprechaun would react to being hit, throwing a punch, kick and special attack. he first part of my process was created the silhouette and then printing to off and cutting it all into separate pieces, so I can manipulate any parts I want to an extent. I would later use the full silhouette to help me create my character in Photoshop. Once I printed out the required pieces I then started to create my animation, since the pieces were all black, I used a light box and a small camera to get my recordings. When conducting this task I didn’t run into many problems, apart from the odd moment when the camera would not be able to get all of my character into frame, which was funny as my character is a Leprechaun. To get these recordings I simply used the software Movie Maker and kept recording and stopping and then exporting the videos, before then going onto premier and having the final animation, with all the pieces included.

The first animation that I did was my Punch: When I was making this animation, I liked my original idea of when I wanted to have an arm that grew and would then punch the enemy in the face, but I ended up going with the hand disconnecting from the arm and hitting the enemy, I got this idea as I wanted the attack to be quick and so when I was thinking of this I looked at E. Honda and his attacks.

The second animation that I did was my Kick: With the kick I liked the idea of adding the Leprechauns pot of gold into the scene. Because of this I thought since my character is very short, it would be a good idea to have him run up and jump off the top of the pot of gold and attack. That’s exactly what I did as you can see in the video is my character running up to the pot, then jumping on top and then double footing jump attack where the enemy would have been.

My third animation that I did was my Special: With my special I wanted to include the pot of gold again and have the stereotype that surrounds the gold which is the rainbow, so I thought of the idea of the Leprechaun going into his pot of gold and then pulling out two coins and firing them into the enemy.

Finally my last animation that I conducted was my Damage taken: When doing my damage taken animation I had to think about getting my character back into the game as quick as possible, as Street Fighter is a fast paced game. So as you can see in the video he gets hit, but doesn’t go down, his head and body just throws back and then is going again.

Reflection While doing this task I encountered only a few problems, but that was mainly down to the position of the camera not getting the full frame. When doing this task I learnt about animation and in my case, I feel that I could have done much better work with the design of the character, as it is hard to be able to tell what my character is if I wasn’t talking about it. That would be something that I would work on much more if I was to set out to do this task again. In the future regarding animation, it will help me to be able to look back at these moves if I go onto animating within 3D and have a better understanding of the difficulty of trying to portray actions through a silhouette.