As our Lab experiment continues, we’ve been asking our creators to look back over the animation they’ve created and tell us a bit about it. This bird world loop is by our Junior Animator, Lucie, and here’s what she had to say…
Hey Lucie! How are you doing today?
I’m good, thanks 🙂
So, can you explain what this animation is?
It’s a 10 second looping animation. A human-chicken hybrid is pooped on by a fancy human-pigeon hybrid.
What was your inspiration?
Concept-wise, I thought it would be funny to have a world where humanoid giant birds are doing normal human things. For instance, taking the bus, going to work, going shopping etc. However, they’d still have their bird-like instincts such as pooping while flying. Artstyle-wise, I was inspired by Scott Benson, the co-creator and animator of the Night in the Woods game. A zine by Mish Scott inspired the main character.
Did you intend to use this as a practice or learning tool?
Yes, I’m still fairly new to the process so feel like every time I start a new creative project by myself I learn loads. I practiced rigging so I got better at it. It was also the first time I would work with a more complex background. I also combined After Effects animation and traditional hand drawn animation.
Can you take us through your process?
This project started off as an idea for a scene in a bigger project. I began by designing and drawing the background, which was done in Photoshop. I’m really proud of how this looks! After being sketched out, each character was created with shapes in Illustrator, which was probably the hardest part for me. Then I set up the scene in After effects and rigged the characters using DUIK Bassel. The poop and the flappy pigeon wings were animated in TV paint.
I originally hadn’t planned to add any parallax to the scene, but after the first pass of animation the scene felt a bit flat. The way I had designed the background and set up the scene made it tricky to add parallax at this stage, so I’d definitely approach this differently next time.
Did you learn anything unexpected?
I’ve become way more comfortable with rigging. Here are some specific lessons I learnt:
- I was tempted to rig things such as the face or hands, or even more specifically the eyes and mouth first. However, it’s important to start from the general and then move onto the particular; you need to rig the whole puppet first and add the details second.
- You can’t rotate or scale something once you’ve added puppet pins to it. Ensure everything is set up correctly before starting to rig.
- It’s important to draw every object fully, such as objects which are hidden behind something, or overlapping the edge of the frame. It was so annoying when I decided to change the composition of the scene a little and realised that the cloud I drew was only a half cloud…!
Would you do anything differently if you were to create something very similar?
I would’ve designed the background differently and drawn every single element better, as it would’ve saved me from using lots of tricks to hide my mistakes. I’d also like to experiment with designing characters with different line thickness.
What did you take away from this overall?
It was super fun and satisfying to get a project to the end. It took much longer than I thought to complete but that’s a lesson learnt for next time 🙂