Back to the Animals

Going back to the animals animation, I realised I needed to refresh my memory and also look a little more in-depth as to how I should go about animating to sound; in this case, conversation... so a little trickier

Don't want to perfectly lip sync the characters, this is a lot of work to take on for a small project... can take months and months to master the art of lip syncing... and plus, there's no need to - like in the work of Oliver Postgate mentioned below, sometimes it's a little more quirky to do it without any lip syncing at all!

Checked out on wikipedia, traditional animation, given me a rough idea of where to start... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_animation#Design_and_timing 

Plan is...

- Draw out storyboards; more detailed so give idea of movement of characters

- Get the voices onto my ipod, so I can sit and work out the best timing for the movement of the characters

- Start drawing out key frames

- Get onto the 'inbetweens'

As for the actual drawing... I wanted to try out a couple of different techniques, perhaps a different technique per character. This way I get a broader understanding of different ways of animating in the traditional hand drawn manner, but with a slight different twist each time

Once I've drawn the animated characters out onto paper, I can then ... 

• leave as a straight hand drawn image per frame so it's a basic etchy illustrative animation
• mask around each frame, to be able to drop a background behind the characters, just to make the scene a little more interesting
• hand draw the background onto each sheet, then scan/photograph each image in

A few things to get going with, now to actually put it into practice!