For week 2 we were tasked with filling a simple flour sack with emotion. It could be anything, a simple bit of joy or fear into the flour sacks life is all that is needed.
During the first week of class I had mostly tried to use ToonBoom Harmony. A program which I had never used before. After a week of trying to learn the interface I found that I was still struggling to complete quite simple tasks just because of how the program was laid out. This led me to switch my approach and I swapped over to Adobe Animate. I am very familiar with the Adobe programs as they are something I used a lot during my undergraduate degree. Although I had barely used Animate itself before the general interface and layout between the adobe programs is very similar and therefore I found it a lot easier to use.
Since I decided to swap over to Adobe Animate I decided it would be best to watch a few different basic tutorials to help me get up to speed quicker than if I was just to use my own current knowledge.
Last week I found this playlist of videos from "TipTut" which showcase the basics of Adobe Animate as well as the basics of creating animation. I found this to be the perfect series to help me learn the program while progressing my animation at the same time.
While looking through this weeks lecture slide I noticed these two drawings of the flour sack beside each other. I felt that both conveyed quite a lot of emotion within their own right and decided that I wanted to create an animation which used these poses.
So I set off into adobe animate to begin a quick animation of the flour sack moving between these two poses.
Attempt 1
To the right I have a quick gif of my flour sack animation. As you can see it isn't very clean and ends pretty abruptly. This is because after I sketched the key poses I wasn't really happy with how the animation was moving forward. I found turning the head of the flour sack quite hard as it doesn't actually really have a head of any sorts, apart from the top of the bag.
I ran into a few problems when trying to move from one pose to the next, these included size of the drawing and timing. I found it difficult to keep to the same size the whole time as I was trying to draw the flour sack bending downwards.
Soon after I gave up on this animation. I had run into too many struggles for my liking and decided that it would be best to go down a different route. I think it was a good learning experience and something I think I should come back and attempt again at a later date.
I went back and looked through the lecture slides again and came across this group of flour sack poses. I found the bottom left pose quite interested. It gave off this kind of jumping for joy and excitement. From here I decided that this is the next pose I was going to try and animate the flour sack doing.
It shouldn't bee too hard and it follows the same squash and stretch principles which I used during week 1 on my bouncing ball animation.
Attempt 2: Rough Sketch
I began by drawing out the key frames again. These started as the final jumping for joy pose and the flour sack normal pose. Next I added the in between's of the jump and landing.
This was only my rough sketch so the linework isn't very clean. I'm going to go back and do a clean linework version of this. This was mostly so I could get the timing right and the poses. It allowed me to draw and redraw as much as I wanted without having to be really precise.
Attempt 2: Linework
Once I had my rough sketch done I went back and did out a clean linework version. I think it turned out pretty well overall. The loping animation kind of gives it the effect that the flour sack is doing constant burpees.
Initially I wanted to convey this sense of jumping of joy however I'm not sure this really comes across very well in my final outcome. If I was to do this again I would definitely make the animation longer overall and maybe have the flour sack hang a bit longer in the air to help show the emotion. Also I wouldn't loop it as fast as I think in a way this takes away from the emotion trying to be conveyed.
