Story for Animation 1st Draft

Open with Cactus Craig looking excitable, pan down to see he is reading a book named 'Why hugs are the best'. 

Craig smiles and sets his book down, confident he has the basics of hugging down. Spotting a big friendly looking red balloon in the distance he waddles his way over. Upon reaching the balloon he stretches arms out wide to engulf it in the biggest hug Craig can muster.  

Pop goes the balloon. Craig looks over the broken pieces of balloon scattered everywhere and lets out a small sigh. He quickly however forgets his troubles when he spots a very friendly looking teddy bear. Unfortunately as Craig approaches the teddy's face goes from a smile to that of shear panic. Teddy runs and hides. Craig sighs again looking more down trodden than before. 

Craig's smile is all but gone now he feels he never will get a cuddle. He returns glumly to his book to read about cuddling once more, a single tear running down his cheek. Suddenly he feels a tap on his shoulder. He turns to see a big round cuddly hedge hog who must have escaped from her cage.  

No words are spoken between the two as the hedgehog opens her arms and wraps Craig in a big firm hug. All that can be seen of the cactus is a big smiling face as the story ends.

Initial Character Designs - Cactus Craig

I am trying to create a likable character which will hopefully get the audience involved in not just the creative process but also the story that we are trying to visually create.

12 Principles of Animation

I feel this being one of the founding basis of animation should be a focus on what Im trying to teach. This video I have come across gives a good example of visually demonstrating the principles. I will want to get across a more informative lesson in which the 'how to' of these principles is focused on and not so much just demonstrating what each principle is.

Example of Animation lessons aimed at children

There is a surprisingly sparse volume of animation materiel aimed at teaching children the basics of the art. I have had a hard time coming up with any solid step by step lessons giving information on the principles of animation or storytelling techniques. This lesson example I have found gives the impression of being aimed at very young children and misses the mark on the age group I would try to target. It seems there could be a real need for structured lessons giving children a way to explore animation before having to pursue it in further education. I will start my research looking into the basic lessons I want to get across and then working on more complex information from there.

Eddies Quadcopter Animation Project

After receiving a small Quad Copter for Christmas I had a few incidents of it going rouge and flying at me seemingly on purpose. This gave me inspiration to try and create an animation about a character trying to control a Quadcopter of there own and inevitably being defeated by it. I hadn't really pushed my animation abilities to any great extent when it came to 2D animation so I wanted to try and really go for a high quality piece of animation. The first thing I wanted to nail down was a solid, simple character design which could be animated in many emotive ways. After I had my character 'Ernie' (Later renamed to Eddie) I was ready to try and block out the extremes of the animation. I wanted to use the Extremes and In Between s sort of animation pipeline as it would let me really push the poses of Eddie and have some really funny scenes. Once my initial sketches were complete I was ready to begin creating the animatics and digitizing what I have on my sketch book. This animation will be done in full 24 fps and will have each frame hand drawn to really push my capabilities and challenge myself.

 First Sketches of Eddie, I was trying to stick to simple shapes which would help with doing squash and stretch animation.

 First pass of how I wanted the animation to unfold, trying to get some really nice exaggerated poses for the extremes.

I wanted to try and nail down what sort of character Eddie is so I tried to put him in various situations and think about how he would act in them.