Moose Walk Cycle

After colouring the cycle in I noticed that he was still getting bigger so I decided it was time to move the frames and loop the walk. I learnt lots of things about animating on photoshop in the process and actually took me a lot longer than I thought it would which made me reasses the method in which I'm going to animate the project. I basically decided to scrap testing the other methods because I think I need to practice animating via photoshop with my new drawing tablet as theres so many things that you can only learn by actually using the software.

So I started by procrastinating as always and watching this which shows a different style of moose and I think by adding the joints to Oliver Jeffer's moose it is a half way point between his illustration and these. I think with these I'm very envious that the characters don't gain in volume but in retrospect what I should of done when hand drawing them, is number one not done them when I wasn't in the mood taken more time and analysed the key frames in size and shape more closely before doing the inbetweens, then it wouldn't of been as a bigger task redoing them.

Brother Bear Animation Moose Tony Stanley and Broose Johnson from Helpful Bear Productions Inc. on Vimeo.

After doing half the walk cycle I learnt that you can highlight several images and move them together in a video group on photoshop, rather than moving them individually. I could of kicked myself for not thinking about trying that sooner. This also works for resizing them and cropping. However does not work for adjusting the frame length.

I was really unhappy with the frame rate and I was changing it and saving it and trying to render it out, and then photoshop would play them at the fastest speeds. By this point I'd started animating his legs moving in the water, I chose to rewrite the storyboard and I decided not to jinx by just scribbling it down, rather than procrastinating by drawing another story board. I decided that the kite flying off could be smoother if you saw his feet and then the kite and it breaking then the moose saving the kite and bringing it back theres a lot less scenes and I think with the process and production module I confused things by having too many scenes. This way wilf isn't revealed as the main character till later on and i think the moose is a much more interesting character so it flows nicer.

So after doing the legs dancing (moving with the wind as he's flying the kite) notice i didn't use joints in his body to the same extent as the moose as i thought it would draw attention away from the moose. I went back to the moose walk cycle as it's a crucial part of the animation I was planning on recycling the frames. I looked back at the video's I'd rendered that were supposedly at a higher frame rate, and they didn't seem to be at a higher frame rate they were just skipping frames, they were still 23seconds long. Which is a ridiculously long amount of time for a moose to walk across the screen, people will fall asleep. I realised, it took a good few hours of shouting at the computer, and more procrastinating with videos like these,

imagine how much fun you could have with a round moose, wilf could use him as a kite.
I realised that although I'd altered the frame rate I hadn't changed the lengths of frame. So Not knowing how to do them as a group I went through and altered them to 30fps, I was so happy that it removed the jerkiness of the walk although I really wished I hadn't done as much shading. That's something to note for next time.

See the moose walk file for all these video versions.

Before this point I'd decided to do a floaty shadow on the background with three different video layers that like fluttered below the moose, but I didn't know how much I'd have to rescale it to change it so I just deleted it. I decided that 30fps was too fast and went down 24. which also put it at a good speed of 10 seconds.

I then mastered how to do a floaty shadow and move it across using the position keyframes. Took me a lot longer than a normal animation student but I was pleased with myself. The moose walk was complete a stress head later.

I also used this walk in the scene where the kits rescued from the tree, however I deleted several frames to make him get to the tree faster, and I flipped it for the final scene and drew the kite on his antler on top of the layers.

Also did his eyes and nostrils in each frame of each cycle separately. He does blink but supersonically fast.