Task: Create a kinetic composition which tells the story of your animal, their behavior, and/or habitat.
Storyboarding & First Animation — 4/10
I was excited to start the first step of this process: storyboarding three different ideas, with one being text-focused, another being animal focused, and a last idea of whatever I wanted.
Since my animal is a loggerhead shrike, I quickly decided that their impaling their prey behavior was their most iconic and I wanted my gif to revolve around it.
I began with a simple idea of the letters of shrike being impaled on the word loggerhead, as the heads of the lowercase ‘g’ in ‘loggerhead’ have that spike on the top that could be made into a spike. I felt it would be too busy in practice though, so I also experimented with the letters being impaled on a spiky branch that was present in my illustration.
For my animal focused draft, I had the action of a mouse being impaled by the loggerhead shrike. But, I think it would be a lot of work to get the motion and timing right for a flying bird, and I really wanted to work with type somehow.
I then had the idea of incorporating the bird in a more simple way in the animation, as seen above. The shrike would impale the word ‘shrike’ on some thorns, and I felt it was a good mix of focusing on type but also showcasing the animal’s motion.
I then went into a more detailed board, as seen below, as well as drafting some other ideas of the shrike (cause I was inspired by my peers’ work). I wanted to keep a “cute” first impression of the bird, only to then show its brutality.
After doodling more, I really liked the idea of the shrike turning to face the camera in the final shot, as if to say “you’re next.” I really wanted to have some fun with this project because I love animation as a medium but have never done it before — I wanted to do something I felt was fun but also feasible within in the deadline and my own ability.
So I started in Illustrator with the type and how I wanted it to move. In the pic below you can see my abandoned idea of the letters being impaled on ‘loggerhead’ because the type looks very distracting when manipulated like that. I also worked on the background and the elements/spacing I wanted.
I wanted to keep the text relatively centered on the screen, so I was playing with the spacing of spikes on the branch to create that effect. As for the actual movement, it seemed very stilted and awkward on the first pass.
After some very helpful advice from Kelsey, I went to Procreate to play with the animation of the letterforms (seen in video below), experimenting with squash and stretch, timing, and the staging.
I also played with the form of the bird and how it’d look in the turn (below).
After looking at my Procreate drafts and putting them into Illustrator, I began animating based on my drafts until I had this:
I was pretty happy with this, and I had a lot of fun doing the bird’s poses. I found myself using the puppet warp tool and drawing new frames in Illustrator by tracing previous frames.
I have yet to figure out any of the timing, but I’m happy with what I have so far to bring into the work day tomorrow.
Animation Refinement — 4/11
After showing my rough animation, Daphne had a few minor suggestions but overall liked the direction I was going in. She said to consider adding clouds to fill the negative space, think about adding consistent motion lines to every part of the word ‘shrike’, and to maybe think about reducing motion, but they were all just tweaks and small details.
I decided to add some slowly moving clouds, add a small wobble when the bird landed on the branch, and tweak a bunch of the foot movement because it was going crazy during the jump sequence.
After compiling the frames into a gif, I played with the timing until I had this:
I tried to follow principles of animation like slow in and slow out, as well as secondary actions (branch shaking). When it came to the bird, there are a few squash and stretch frames that I shortened in the gif maker to try to give the illusion of movement.
I felt the branch shake was too dramatic, and that the letters still felt a little slow, so I went back to tweak it until I had this version:
Yay! Time for the class rough showcase.
Finalizations — 4/12
The little showcase went well, and I felt I only had a few tweaks to make. Looking at other people’s gifs (which were amazing, btw), there were some elements I wanted to borrow from them. A lot of people used shadows to create a sense of depth, which I wanted as well.
First, I created shadows for the shrike itself as well as the letters, but it ended up looking very janky because the letters are 2D so the shadows did not make sense in my head or in Illustrator.
I also added some wiggle effect lines on the letterforms when they’re being muscled onto the thorn, which I think work better to express the motion.
So I removed the shadows from the letters and kept them for the shrike, since the shrike is a 3D object with form. After speaking with some peers and the TAs, I also added a shake to the branch when the ‘S’ and ‘H’ landed and fixed the thorn in the H to feel more organic.
Here’s the final gif!! :
Overall, I really enjoyed this sprint of a project! It was my first time animating, so I read and watched a lot of examples to try to understand the principles. I’ve always been a huge animation fan, but never had the guts to try it, but I’m so glad I did. It was really fun even in a non-animation program and I have a lot of appreciation for people who animate/do motion graphics as a job. I’d like to explore motion more in my design career.
I learned a lot about knowing what was feasible within the time limit we had, and that starting simple and building to complexity is often the way to go. Clearly organizing your files and leaving yourself the opportunity to iterate was really important, and I’m glad I finally labeled my Illustrator layers. I think I finally let myself have more fun in the process but not get overly attached to my work, so I’m happy with the result and the time I spent to get it.