Adding the Enemy
My warrior prince needed an enemy to attack (as he does in the storyboard and animatic)
I had been putting it off, but I got the stage where my animation really needed the enemy, but I wasn't sure how to animate them. I knew what I wanted the enemy to look like, but on my first few attempts the animation just didn't work, it was poorly timed and choppy and the movement of the character was unrealistic.
This was one of my first attempts at adding the enemy. It follows the motion of the animatic, but I wasn't happy with the look of the character and I knew as soon as I tried to play the blocked out animation that I was never going to create realistic movement.
I tried several versions, one with just the enemy's sword arm and one with the enemy entering from the side of the stage, but neither worked, and I wanted the animation to follow the storyboard and animatic.
I was also unhappy with the colour of the enemy's hair when it was yellow, so I decided to keep it turquoise.
When these attempts failed, I decided to use rotoscoping to ensure that I had a realistic movement for the enemy.
I enlisted the help of my husband to film me doing the motion, although I am loathed to share it. And in this gif you can also see where I drew over each frames to show the enemy's clothing.
These are the individually drawn frames from the rotoscoping, overlayed to make sure the motion in the animation is smooth.
This is how I animated the whole short, with individually draw frames for each transition in a movement.
Once I had done this, I needed to import these outline drawings into Animate to be drawn properly.
With the character drawn and coloured I needed to add shading to make the character look like they belong in the animation and give them depth.
Although the rest of the animation has only one layer of shading, the character in the foreground needs more depth and definition, so I needed to add another layer of shade, and possibly some more colour to the character, however I don't want to add too much detail.