Stick Figure Animation

**3 Months later **

I have continued to be interested in animation, and been watching videos etc. I have not been doing much of it myself - I’ve dabbled here and there but nothing compared to what I was doing in the DK30.

I have now started a new project over on the skillshare website. Finally I have now finished a simple stick figure animation which was the goal of this project :). Posting it on here so it’s all wrapped up!

And an updated ball bounce!

Ball bounce

Week 3

This week I struggled a bit more due to going back to work. I had less time and lacked a bit of direction.

I started to work on stick figure animation but found it quite difficult. I choose stick figure animation as i thought it would be the easiest to learn. I couldnt find good material to learn from which was free. So I tried taking what I learnt from the past weeks and gave it a go myself.

Here are some run cycles I attempted!

I was not very proud of these! I was a bit lost in what do to or where to go from here… I spent a couple days just browsing youtube for tutorial videos and animation videos in general.

I stumbled across Ed Tadeo. I watched his “lets animate, Lara Croft vs. Lizard” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N70J8l0HSPI&t=142s) which was awesome. I loved how he shown his process by drawing the frames.

As with previous weeks I found success in just copying a concept piece and making it work. So I decided to copy this run cycle from Lara to teach myself how it works. I spent Thurs - Sun doing this:

It need a lot of polish! But I’m super happy with what i’ve achieved this week considering it started off so poorly.

Week 4 I may continue with this one… or have another crack at a stick figure - we shall see!

Week 2

This week I went onto further learn some of the basics. I found it hard to find good tutorial style content online which is for beginners. However, the internet is an endless pool of resource and I managed to use a very popular video called the 12 principles of animation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDqjIdI4bF4&t=861s). The comments where very good and I found it extreamly helpful!

Day 1

I decided I will go through each principle and try to apply it. Day 1 was all about squash and stretch.

Similar to the first week I started with a ball bounce, however this time applying this principle to make it feel like it has weight and character.

I then applied this to a couple other drawings for pratice…

**Day 2 - Day 5 **

Here is where I went a little off schedule. I wanted to try and create a character I could apply this too. Also I was wanting to try and draw a little more whilst listening to music. So I got a little carried away. I used a concept piece from google and based my drawing against it.

*Concept *

I then went onto draw this myself (I’m no artist aha!)

Day 2/3 - was when I started to animate this, which I saw as too big of a task. I felt the drawing took so long for me to do, and I wouldn’t be able to animate it. So i went on the principle I learnt in week 1. Motion tweens! I figured if I seperate the limbs and give them pivots I will be able to make a very simple animation.

However, due to me already drawing it as one piece this was very hard to pull off, I only managed to come up with this:

**Day 3-5 **

I then thought to myself… lets have some confidence and attempt to do this frame by frame. I managed to draw the first picture from the concept piece so why not give it a go. After lots of mornings and evenings of drawing, cutting, pasting, correcting mistakes. I managed to come up with this!

I realised the leg looks a bit odd out side the cloth, so I thought I’ll tuck it back in and give it a go to animate the cloth also! I tried to implement principles from the original video. I attempted to make it seem as the axe hits the ground the cloth reacts and goes up and his head also follows the movements. I learnt a lot from doing this! Super happy with how it turned out.

I could watch that all day! From not thinking I would even be able to draw the concept piece to doing this within less than a week! Goes to show what you can do when you put your mind to it!

I wanted to get him to hit something but I ran out of time this week as I feel I need to move onto trying to animate stick figures :). Lets so what will happen in week 3.

Week 1

So it begins! My name is Phill (Philetic on twitch) - I got into this project as its a great time to start a new hobbie! Love the encouragement Day9 gives his audience with these projects and always been meaning to get involved. I used to do Graphic design in college, it’s been years since I’ve done anything like this.

I started this project a week early. I used a very good beginners video to help me learn the basics of Adobe Animate. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49yK2AfG8kc)

The first stage of this video teaches the basics of the tools and interface of the program, it’s very well put together, so I was able to follow along nice and easily. It then goes onto teach some of the basics around using the tools and animating. I followed along with each step!

**Ball bounce! ** (Day1)

After learning about how to organise your objects / drawings into symbols and motion tweens, I went onto put this to the test. A symbol will highlight what you have drawn and make it into one piece, a tween would then allow this Symbol to be animated or have motion. This would allow you to have various objects, i.e Dog, Man, Cat - which will all be saved into the Libary for later use if needed!

This one was interesting as it needed no artistic skill, it was literally making a ball bounce. - along with understanding how to manipulate the ball in order to understand how to simulate the gravity effect. I enjoyed doing this one, and once you complete it you get such a sense of achievement. One thing I love about animation is the idea of bringing things to life!

Ball Bounce!

Swing Day 2

I then learnt about pivots and how to change the point. This would enable you to rotate the object around a certain point. Great for animating limbs for example, pivot on the shoulder, elbow and wrist could make up a very simple arm animation.

Wave Day 3

I put all these new skills to the test and attempted to create an Arm waving! It’s always interesting learning from a video, there were a few times when I just needed a teacher in person to ask them “Where is this?” “How does that work?” - but great thing about video learning is the rewind button and you can work it out eventually.

Putting it all together, Day 5

We then moved onto animating within the symbol, this was a real eye opener for me. You can animate a motion within the symbol on a separate timeline. When this is then put into the main timeline, it will loop that animation for as long as you allow it. A walk cycle for instance. The video explains this, and also shows how you can move a background to help simulate movement as well. I created a background along side my first stick man! This was all done very quickly mind.

I managed to create a very janky walk cycle along side a moving background! I also moved the clouds separately to the rest (by accident) but it looks kind good like that? At least I left it like that, as you can imagine once you make one mistake fixing it is a little trickey as you create a dominio effect.

Heres some of the screen shots of the Timelines,