Project Objectives
My benefactor has hired me to make an animation blending traditional hand drawn animation with digital animation. In particular they want an animation of a hungry cat.
Challenges
In a terrible twist of fate, I am not experienced with hand-drawn animation. My field has always primarily been in digital animation. I only know the bare principles of the style, so my biggest challenge is to figure out how to hand-animate within the time limit.
Research: How does a Cat...
Look?
Cats have a variety of looks, ranging in size, color, and to an extent shape. The most iconic part of any cat however is their face and tail. Some of the first things people think of when they see a cat is long tails, pointed ears, and their whiskers. It's important to maintain these features in an animation so its immediately recognizable to the viewer no matter what motion they're making.
Move?
Cats move in a very unique manner, and thus have lots of different motions to consider when drawing one in motion.
In this video you can see how cats use their nose to gather information on objects of interest.
The following two videos are interesting because they show how a cat's ears let them sense their surroundings, even if they're not watching with their eyes. The way their ears move is fascinating to me and I want to replicate that in my animation.
This video is of a cat stretching, noting how flexible it is while getting up from its rest.
The following are just cats moving around. I'm primarily studying how they move their bodies so I can translate it into animation.
Sound?
Cats don't make a ton of sound when they move, as it'd be difficult to hunt prey if they were anything but silent. However they do make meow and chirp, usually to communicate with other cats and people how they feel. The big sound I want to include it purring, however I'd like it to be subtle for the digital animation to better reflect the specific cat I'm animating.
Research: Hungry
Hungry became less and less of a priority as I worked on the project. While the cat is eating in it, I was entirely focused on the cat's movement over hungry. However with the digital blend I think it will add further context and tie together the cat's hunger.
Above are some hungry cats and imagery, which eventually gave me inspiration for the final animation. All of this brought the idea, what if the cat wasn't fed? At first the idea was to have it be a chef who cooks its own meals. But that would change by the final iteration.
Principles of Motion
Squash and Stretch: I already prefer using squash and stretch for all my motion, as its how I learned motion design.
Anticipation: Fortunately cats are very deliberate creatures. So I think anticipation can be show by having its tail or ears indicate what its paying attention to. I also saw that they generally slowly get ready to pounce, which would be great anticipation for an action.
Staging: I think the best way to handle staging is to have its ears following the point of interest, then having the face follow up.
Straight Ahead/Pose to Pose: I'm using Pose to Pose.
Arc: When a cat jumps or climbs there's an arc to it. The last video of the cat in motion has it climb up the chair, and there's a slight arc to its movement. For animation this can be exaggerated in order to have the climbing read clearly.
Secondary Action: The tail is a perfect source of secondary action. In lieu of facial expressions, a tail can be used to indicate what the cat is feeling at any given time. Swaying when it's interested, down when it's scared, motions like that can give extra character and feeling of an animation. This is one of the two things I really want to focus on in this study.
Storyboard
Note: The storyboard was simply the baseline for the animation. Eventually I moved away from it as seen in the final animation. However it's still the first ideation I had with the concept, having the cat reading a recipe book.
The Animation Process
This project was a lesson in time management, stress, and learning from your mistakes. I struggled a lot during this project, dealing with multiple obstacles. The first being my struggles with getting my cat to animate in a nice way. The following videos are my first attempts at it, to disappointing results.
A couple of days later I had finished more, and while I had improved it, it still looked underwhelming. The big issue I'm facing is that I'm not putting enough frames in the slow motion compared to the fast motion. I'm used to fast snappy motions in a small window of frames. For the next iteration of animation I hope to make the animation more clear in what the cat is doing by emphasizing the beginning sniffing using more frames.
I later decided that too many frames was better than none. So I drew a ton of frames, easily over 40 frames of animation for the cat. However, I only needed 5-10 seconds of animation for him. So I cut it down a bit in hopes to give myself more levity and to keep the animation simple. It also didn't help that my scanner was malfunctioning by the time I needed it, but I think I was able to put together a good video with what I had.
In addition I also added sound effects to give the video a bit more flair. They're a bit subtle, but I'm happy with them. The credits for all the sounds I used are below.
"Swing set" by Marnenagel (https://freesound.org/people/Marnenagel/sounds/408496/) under CCBYNC 3.0
"Door Open Close" by Amholma (https://freesound.org/people/amholma/sounds/344360/) under CC01.0
"cat_sneeze_pur_soft_freule.wav" by Anton (https://freesound.org/people/Anton/sounds/305/) under CCBY3.0
"Cat Sneeze.wav" by CGEffex (https://freesound.org/people/CGEffex/sounds/102574/) under CCBY4.0
"gasping" by Alivvie (https://freesound.org/people/Alivvie/sounds/436781/) under CC01.0
The Final Submission
Post-Critique Video
