Creating this flipbook I found to be a great challenge. While I have animated a flipbook once before and a few various other projects, I had never animated a human or a character running in such a way. Because of my lack of experience in knowing how to begin the animation as it is, I had a false start or two. I jumped into the project too quick without taking things into consideration.
After having the character fall, which was easy enough, the first problem I encountered was the skirt. I had it fall down while she was in the air. I did not think about the fact the skirt should still be up at least until she hit the ground. I had to go back and fix the three frames in order to get a smoother movement.
The second and most frustrating issue that I ran into was the character running. Two different things occurred here. I had ‘sliding limbs’, as in, her feet were not moving forward as they should have been. Second, the beginning stride was too long to allow for an increase in pace originally. I miscalculated how much room Acholate would take up of the card with the size I had gone with.
To fix the first problem I was more careful in the placing of my character, paying attention to where the feet were at all times. Instead of trying to finalize all of the drawings right away, I used stick figure like bases for the movement. I wanted the movement to make sense, even though the character is not as polished as it could be. Not all drawings are of the same character but my choices allowed for a smoother movement with no ‘sliding’ feet.
The second issue was more frustrating to figure out. I had to figure out a shorter stride that was still something of a jog. I was able to then take this new stride and have two cycles of it. A simple way to increase the pace, I found, was to lengthen the stride till she was off the page. I attempted to increase the difference between the strides further by slightly slowing down the cycles of the jog.
Overall I believe this project has helped me learn a more appropriate way to create an animation. Instead of jumping in headfirst and trying to finalize frames before getting all the positioning done, I need to create the base of the character. This technique allowed me to fix a majority of my problems and smoothed out my work flow.
Sara Recktenwald 