Pose to Pose Animation Part II

Once we'd finished the pendulum and demonstrated a good 
grasp of pose to pose animation, we went on to create our own pose to pose animations, planning out the motion and key frames and then filling in the gaps in between. However, this time we could animate whatever we wanted to. I jotted down some ideas of possible objects or scenarios to animate. I looked at the flight of birds and the way they move through the sky, I thought it would be really interesting to see if I could capture this. 

I started to do research into this, and came across the photography work of Eadweard Muybridge. His work was perfect for looking at, as it showed frame by frame shots of the movement of animals, and in some cases, the movement of birds. This frame by frame type grid of the birds in flight was extremely useful when imagining and referencing their movement as I was drawing the animation as I wanted it to be as real and accurate as possible to real life. 

Bird in Flight, Edweard Muybridge

The first thing I did when I started producing the animation was draw almost a flight path for the bird I was animating, which in my case was an owl. I decided to do an owl because I liked the shape of them as the flew through the air, I also liked the soft feather like nature of their wings - I thought this would be easy to replicate since I wasn't going into huge amounts of detail with each drawing. After the flight path was drawn I added in the positions of frames along the path of flight before drawing in the key frames at the start and end of the animation. Once this had been completed I had a second thought about the nature of the flight of birds and how I wanted to achieve an accurate representation of it on paper. I was thinking about aspects such as the speed of the bird as the flap their wings and at which point they would be accelerating and decelerating. I changed the path of flight here because of this, once I realised that I wanted a burst of speed from the bird once they flapped their wings downwards, rather than the inaccurate and linear motion that would have been shown before I made this alteration. Once I was happy with the direction of motion of the bird I drew in the frames which came to a total of around ten frames for the animation. I then scanned them in and saw what the final version of the animation images looked like. 

Final Animation, Bird in Flight