Animation and drawing

I took a long time animating all of my graphics. I really thought that it was of paramount importance that I did the animation frames as smooth and proportionate to each other as possible. As I said in one of my previous posts, I was inspired by characters and environments such as those in old 8 and 16 bit console games. Form and functionally is extremely important in all forms of design, but there has to be an equilibrium between the two to create something, which is both aesthetically and practically harmonic.

For the walking animation I drew and scanned 12 individual frames and then went over each one with the pen tool in illustrator then messed about with the colour settings. This in all was a highly time consuming process, which with the facilities I had, couldn't really have been avoided. If I were to go back and do this process again I wouldn't definitely invest in a graphics tablet as I could get better stroke effects using the pressure sensitive feature. Not only that but the drawing phase would be far quicker overall. I would also have done it the way I did my later graphics such as the trees and headstones. First I drew a layer in illustrator with no stroke and a black fill to mark the outline point. I then created another similar shape within the lines that also had no stroke but this time they had the fill colour. The next thing I do is use the knife tool to cut the shadowed bits, then recolour with a darker tone. Below I have shown the different layers of colour in the headstone graphic.



The good thing about using illustrator is that vector points and curves can be easily manipulated. Multiple illustrator layers can also be imported as keyframes into a flash movie clip, making animation much easier to achieve. All the grass in the game is animated. I achieved this by making a basic "zig zag" grass graphic, then made 5 copies of it each on seperate frames. I then went into each layer and grabbed the tips of the grass blades and moved them a bit mor each frame. Once I was happy with those 6 frames i simply copied them, reversed them and placed them after the original 6 to make a fluid loop. Another thing I did was put ants crawling up and down the headstone as if at work. For this I just had to duplicate the same ant shape and adjust their positions and rotation values to make sure the 12th frame would go seamlessly back into the first.