Monday 6th January 2014

Animation of the cat

I left animating very late but I have gotten around to retrying the animation of the cat stretching and then walking forwards. This was certainly a big improvement compared to the first attempt, however, it still does not work as well as I have hoped. The beginning part where the cat stretches it's paws out and then stands up, I personally believe it works pretty well. In the first attempt the animation just looked a lot like shape-shifting, this time however, I think it looks like the cat is stretching. So after I was happy with it I needed the cat to walk forwards and also turn so it could like into the already prepared walk cycle. This did not go at all to plan. To begin with I had drawn the cat at an awkward angle and it would require me to pretty much redraw it all again. The angle I drew the cat at meant that the cat would walk at a diagonal rather a straight line, that isn't really too bad except instead of going from left to right, the cat starts walking from right to left. This means it begins walking in the opposite direction than the walk cycle. I don't want the cat to be walking from right to left for the entire animation as I find it easier to have the animation moving from left to right. Another problem I once again encountered was maintaining the cats face during each frame. It once again diverted from the original image as I continued to struggle to make the face look the same. 

Although this attempt was also pretty much a failure again I feel that make the cat walk forward wasn't done that badly. Because of the awkward angle, I once again struggled to find any useful references to assist me in my animation, I decided to draw the walk cycle using the reference I used for my first walk and then tweak the drawing to suit the angle. It wasn't done as well as the first walk cycle but it worked slightly. More importantly the cat didn't look like it was either sliding or stuttering across the stage.

Compared to the first attempt I used many more frames for this animation. Although most of it is actually of the walk cycle, the first 15 keyframes are all for the stretching of the cat.

Backgrounds

After I had finished with my second attempt, I decided to work on the background some more as it was very bare. I didn't really know what colours to use for the majority of the scene so I decided to colour everything in a mixture of whites, greys and blacks. This gave the animation a bit more to it, although the colours do not represent the season well at all. The beginning segment of the animation is supposed to be set in spring. The usage of grey gives it a very gloomy feel so it doesn't portray spring well at all. If anything the greys would be more suited to autumn as it's typically a raining season, so I need to add more suitable colours to my animation but for now I'm going to leave it grey and focus on the main animation.