Animation update

Howdy folks!

Today I have an update on the animation I posted last weekend. I've added another character and his walk cycle to the movie. This character is a rather dapper doggy. He walks a bit slower as he has a shorter stride, and he's a bit older.

I'll keep posting updates as I finish animating characters, and then once I have enough to "finish" a scene I used in my Christmas animation (click here to see the original in all it's glory: Joy to the World) I'll post a link to that. As I've stated before my goal here is to add characters, and vehicles, and just MORE stuff to help fill out the original scenes.

This walk cycle is the same length as the previous two I've posted, 8 frames. I create my 8 frame animation by breaking apart a colorized pencil drawing, and then posing the legs, arms, torso, head and sometimes tail how I want it in each frame. I use my original Preston Blair-esque walk cycle as a template(that's it in the left side of the frame of the animation below).

Then I set the frame rate (how long each frame lasts), and render it out. I do all of this work in PhotoShop. Once I have created a sufficient number of extras, I will begin comping, or compositing these new characters into the scenes I already created last year, using After Effects. This is a process of layering the animated and still objects in the scene to give it more depth. Right now all these characters are walking at the same speed, and are very uniform. In the scene I will vary their rate of walking so they are each a little different from one another. The whole animation is 20 seconds at this point. 10 seconds of the first three characters walking along, then the dog flips in, and walks with the others for 10 seconds.

As always I hope you've enjoyed my work, and that you will feel free to leave a comment, or ask a question. Thanks for stopping by, have a great day, and God bless.