Weaver development work

Some more Development work for old man Weaver. I attempted drawing just the skeleton to see how much I could bend his spine, it also helps with drawing the character and to add features easily.
You’ll notice that he gets shorter and his back bends more each time I draw his skeleton. I believed it to be a good process to get the figure I’d been thinking of.

I drew another couple of skeletons just to help me draw the character. I also tried drawing some of his different emotions to add a little more life to him.

Weaver Research

Having Weaver being an old man is going to be tricky because this character also needs to appeal to an audience. I’ve been looking at well known old men characters from films to learn how to add that appeal to my old man Weaver.

A very popular character is Carl Fredricksen from Disneys UP

Another is George Hautecourt from Disney’s Aristocats

And Geri from Disney’s short animation Geri’s game and Toy story 2

Character – Weaver

Development

I struggled for quite a while on weaver. I wanted to do an old man who runs his own suit shop and stitches suits back up by hand. I started by drawing multiple types of old men until I found one that I liked.

I kind of liked the bottom left man in a wheelchair but I didn’t think it would fit well for an old man running his own suit shop. I really liked the old man in the top right corner, I thought he’d do perfectly for my character even though he seems really old I imagined he’d sit down while stitching up suits with some tea and biscuits. So I developed on him a little further and create a character sheet of him.

Character design brief. Morte, Clank and Weaver

A recent Brief that’s been given to me is to create and appealing character with the name Morte, Clank or weaver. The character has to suit its name and have some sort of attraction for an audience.Doing some research about the 3 names I found out some interesting stuff. Clank didn’t have much to offer apart from that it being “A metallic sound”. Morte however means death which was unexpected if I’m honest. Finally Weaver, it can be another name for the ploceidae bird there’s also a spider with the name crevice weaver and another called orb-weaver and a fish known as the weaver-fish. Another interesting thing is the weaver stance, a two handed stance used for when firing hand guns developed by Los Angeles county deputy Sheriff Jack Weaver.

Anticipation scraps

Our next task is to do an animation that involves anticipation. Here’s a few ideas I came up with that can have anticipation in them.

Fat cat jumping test

I scanned in the fat cat drawings, placed them in photoshop, cut them up and played it to see how it looked. You can watch it >here<

Cat bounce squash and stretch

We had to show the movement in animation of when something moves. We were given a list of things to choose from to animate and a list of what they could be doing. I chose a fat cat jumping!

Here’s the fat cat design ideas

And here’s the fat cat jumping.. Well it’s all drawn and it doesn’t move but it’s the drawings of it jumping! I scanned it in on the computer later :’)

Bounce, squash and stretch

I found a good example of bounce, squash and stretch of an animated frog jumping.

  

So like the running dog I posted earlier the frog bounces and stretches out. Then as it goes to land it starts to squash in. Now imagine if the frog didn’t stretch out the way it did when taking off in the air, it wouldn’t look as real as it does, would it? and that’s why these principles are in place for animation, to make the experience as real as possible so we don’t feel like we’re just watching a screen of drawings but instead become immersed within the animations themselves.

Squash and stretch

Squash and stretch is one of the 12 principles of animation. It’s what makes animations look more realistic and is used in everything made to look alive/ in motion. It does this by adding a sense of weight and flexibility.
For example: A bouncing ball

Or a more complex drawing, a running dog.

You’ll notice when the dog runs it squashes in and stretches out.

You’ll see this happen in many running animals. However it’s not just in animals. Like I mentioned earlier it’s a method used to make any object look realistic when animated.