Part 3: Flick-books and Animated Gifs

 This exercise was another I was interested to try. I enjoy using other artists Gifs and animated stickers on Instagram, on a daily basis. I would like to create my own soon and use them on social media, including my YouTube videos.

Again I wanted to try to bring my voice into this exercise and so I decided to a chase scene between two dogs. I based this on our two Dalmatians Skye and Elsa. Elsa is a puppy and so it's not unusual for her to steal toys from her sister resulting in a chase.

I started by working in Procreate for this, I just used very loose colour shapes for the dogs to try to work out how to get them to move.

This was my first attempt. I was trying to get them to run in a circle but it got too complicated to I changed it to running across the screen.

Running in Circles

Running Across Screen

I then wanted to add more details so I sketched out Dalmatians running. I used a combination of videos of our own girls and royalty free images. It was hard to capture the body structure correctly. I watched how our girls move and how their legs work. I watched our video over and over to try to understand too.

I sketched these out to try to make a flip book but it was too complicated for me at this stage. I watched some videos on how to make flip books as well but I think my subject was too complex for me as I've not really done these before.

In the end I played around on Procreate and re-drew the legs over and over to try to get them as accurate as I could. I also make the tails and ears move. This was the final animation.

I'm quite pleased with how this has turned out considering how difficult I found animating. I have done a bit of animation before at college but I think trying to make eight legs move correctly and the tails and ears was quite a challenge. I'd still like to try the flip books and will have ago at doing more own animations in my spare time as I think this will be a fun skill to master.

References:

2022. Pixabay. [online] Available at: <https://pixabay.com/photos/dalmatian-dog-running-action-4025682/> [Accessed 18 May 2022].

Youtu.be. 2022. Flipbooks with SOUND FX // Awesome Battle 1-10. [online] Available at: <https://youtu.be/J2P-vU5EHBY> [Accessed 12 May 2022].

Youtu.be. 2022. How to Make  a Flipbook. [online] Available at: <https://youtu.be/Un-BdBSOGKY> [Accessed 12 May 2022].