It’s tough to find time to create. Life’s busy and only getting busier for everyone. So it’s fun to take a few hours and just make something easy.
My wife draws adorable creatures. Frogs, birds, dogs cats... you name it, they're all adorable. So I picked up one of her doodles and created a simple little animation. A little music, a quote from TS Elliot and it's a little thing.
Here are the layers you need to chop up if you wanted to animate something like this. Each piece gets rotated or bent to create the motion. If you are planning to animate something from the concept, it’s easy enough to plan the layers so that you can puppet them. But, in this case the drawing was just a drawing. So there was a fair amount of redrawing to create assets that could layer and move while still working together as a whole. For instance, when the tail flicks up, Kitty’s rear paw needed to be drawn so that there wasn’t a hole left when the tail moved.
One of the things that’s fun about animation is solving problems like that. You’re always finding little challenges that you have to get creative to overcome. But, there’s always a way. Especially with 2d animation. Worst case, you just create a series of individual drawings and anything is possible.
The fish are easy, you just draw a motion path for them to follow and set an in and an out.
