Christmascard animation project

Christmas Card Animation

Our final task for the Introduction to Animation course was to create 15 to 50 seconds long season greetings animation in a medium of our own decision. I'm sharing my process here because this is an animation project blog after all!

First I had to figure out the idea and I did that fast to save time and went for a quite literal Christmas card animation. At first I was planning five different scenes but while making the storyboard I figured there wouldn't be enough time for the animations in the scenes, so decided to limit the scenes for two different main scenes and then there would be page flipping of the Christmas card. Here is a GIF of the final storyboard:

I got a lot of good feedback that opened my eyes about the complexities of the animation ahead. First, the page turning would be difficult in that style and would work better with silhouette content. Same goes with the main scenes, because of their detailed looks you are expecting a story to unfold, but then the page already turns and you might feel disappointed. Very good point that I didn't realize, it is very valuable to get feedback from others to your ideas indeed!

In the end I decided to change my confusing plan of making the animation with Krita and After Effects, and using only Krita and doing the animation frame by frame. Many people seem to appreciate frame by frame and think it's somehow another level of animation, but I don't see it like that. It's easy, simple, you see very fast what you are creating and will it work, and it's mostly drawing and not so practical with all confusing effects etc. Truly a comfort zone for me, have to step out of that some time.

The idea of the girl skating on the ice of the river in a forest had been on my mind for a while for an animated GIF to make in my free time, but when I heard about the task I decided to combine the idea with it. For the story behind it I first had an idea about a story containing 20 frames of action but had to abandon that because of the time limit. Too bad it's difficult for me to think of simple ideas, they easily get out of hand and grow to be too big to produce. In the end I only used couple of frames of it, leaving almost no story left. 

My main focus was the last frame because it had been in my mind the longest and I still planned to make it very similar with the original GIF idea; you have to watch it couple of times before you see everything what is going on. 

My favorite part is the fox. I used my cats as a reference and even crawled on all fours by myself to see what is the order of the steps. XD Footprints in the snow were tricky to create because they seemed to reveal all the errors in the animation and I must say after this I have a new respect for Bambi movie.

The feedback for the final animation was a lot what I expected, the last scene was the most liked one and obviously the one that took the time from the others. It would have been enough if I only focused to the last scene and maybe changed the timing a little so that  each moving part would have their own turn to shine. So true!! That's what my twin sister said but I was so sure it cannot be only one scene. 

My creation was said to have some animation thinking going on there and that feedback made me very happy! Can't wait for future projects and learning more!