Gonna admit that I'm super proud of this considering I had no video or even photo reference.
I did use a custom 3D head I slapped together in CSP to help with the head rotation, but this is some of the biggest facial expression work I've done to date.
As per usual, this is from the book trailer I'm making for my already released novel, Secondhand Origin Stories.
Im sick and not working today, but i have animator brain rot & i still wanna talk animation. So lemme share some snippets of process for this rough animation
First thing, i do scribble pass. Everything in this post is animated in the rough animator ipad app!
The scribble pass is pure gesture, not stressing about mass or model or any of the fundamentals yet. Focusing solely on the idea and rough timing(and also what i find fun to draw, like expressions and smears)
(Like this smear haha)
Next i did the kick! I animated a loop of a single kick, but it felt a little boring.
To add some spice, i decided to keep it to 3 distinct kicks, & took the impact key and skewed it into 3 different positions. Then i skew adjusted the extreme pullback key to fix its arcs. And then from there it was just skewing the inbetweens to keep the anim smooth.
From here i took a run at the upper body. But i didn't like my first pass (you can see it faintly under the cylinder).
It was lacking depth, it felt boring and flat. I was having a hard time imagining the motion i wanted, so i simplified it down to a cylinder, which was much eaier (and faster) to wrap my head around. I wrote notes on the side, because i was working on this in short increments, and didn't want to forget when I'd pick it up again, hours later.
From there, i plot out my keys, and track my arcs.
I picked the elbow points as theyre the outer most points so they move the most, and are the easiest to make a big circle arc with. But i also keep in mind my arcs on the head and features as im flipping.
And then I'm sorely lacking the WIPs from then to the end, but this is what i ended up with:
I add a big antic before the smear, a small overshoot when the character hits the screen. Keeping them static except for the eyes and arm, and then another antic down.
I haven't fully finished the loop, its missing frames to get the character back in their seat. I'll eventually take it into toonboom to clean up and to fully finish the loop.
Hope this was at least an interesting read! I shared it on twitter a while back, and a few folks mentioned how nice it was to see the "ugly" side, the thinking sode, instead of beautiful polished work haha.