The first time I witnessed animation in action was in an animated movie. The way the character’s expression and the dialogues bring out the emotions is what made me fall in love with illustration and animation.

I looked up a few reference images online and practiced it roughly on procreate before actually animating. Steve’s notes came in handy to understand the phonetics and gave me a head start.

I felt that I will struggle a lot with this one but I wasn’t half bad at it. I did not want my character to not move while talking. It ended up moving too much but I don’t see that as an issue.

For my character, I chose a monkey, wearing lip colour, who is teaching you how to whistle. Because, why not.

For our second lip sync, we were given a studio to record our own audio. It was an amazingly fun experience. I went the “drama” route. My recording was bigger than I expected it to be. I had to cut it short and it still ended up being about 8 seconds long. This one sounds dark but it was actually supposed to be funny because I spoke about how I want to haunt my own people in my own language. However, I had to cut it out.

In all my animation exercises, I have tried to practice some element of my drawing skills. For instance, I am not too good at drawing hands and I tried to add it here to challenge myself.

I really had to redo this over and over again. I made a rough sketch and then decided on using a ink pen brush to do the cleaning up. I have always enjoyed working with sketchy brushes and this was the first time I was using such a smooth brush which isn’t something that I might do again.

The need to try something new with every exercise led me to really exhausting animations but they definitely helped me grow and learn. I wanted to try the lineless way of colouring with this one. One of my classmate’s styles pushed me to give it a shot. Also, I definitely like it better when my animations have colours in them.

I recorded myself for this exercise and tried to use it as a reference and exaggerate expressions while drawing. However, The expressions may have been a little over the top but I didn’t feel the need to change it later.

One of the biggest things I learnt with this exercise is to never color the keyframes without doing the in-betweens. It was a blunder and I ended up spending way too much time on this then I should have. I started working on this exercise on procreate as I hadn’t bought tv paint by then so it was all the more complicated to animate it properly with the colored frames.

The idea of doing this exercise with a robot hit me while re-watching wall-e. Here are a few frames that I really like from the final animation.

I was paired with Vaibhavi for this exercise. She hails from India too and contacted me almost immediately after the email was out. On our first call, she ran me through her final project idea and told me about her style and showed me some of her work. I realised her style isn’t very complicated and she uses very limited colors. I really really liked the movie that she made for Children’s society and was very relieved to know that she is very flexible and accommodative.

Roles given to me:

She is already done with her animatic more or less and she is amending it now. We discussed and decided on a few things that I can do immediately and few things that I volunteered to do over Easter holidays as well, if need be. She asked me to do the background initially but she was given new feedback and is changing a animatic a little so that is on hold. I started with colouring a character for her and making an expression sheet and hand sheet for another. I also did a turnaround and will be working on helping her with sketching one last character.

She sent me references for all these characters. Since her story is based in India, with the characters being Indian too. I was able to understand the cultural nitty-gritties of it and make a few suggestions.

Feedback Recieved:

I was able to properly complete my deliverables and Vaibhavi seemed to be happy with it. The color pallet had limited colors and shading so it went smoothly. Similarly, I did justice to the turnaround and expression sheet. The last bit was designing the new character which is something that Vaibhavi is not very sure of as yet. She received some insights from the tutors and is rethinking how she wants to go ahead with it.

How did I perform:

I feel like I did justice to the tasks assigned to me and would want to be involved in this even after these two weeks.

What could I have improved on:

I don’t think that there is anyplace where I lagged with this whole exercise. I was able to deliver what was assigned to me without any corrections.

How does the given role relate to industry roles:

Honestly, I didn’t feel like two weeks was long enough to drill down into this. So, I am unsure how does this relate to industry roles per se.

Did you enjoy the experience:

I really enjoyed the whole experience. My second year was really sweet and accommodative. She didn’t really push anything on me and asked me what am I comfortable with and also asked for my suggestions and opinions. Her style is very different from mine so it was a good change.

What was successful during the collaboration?

I think what really worked for us was constant and clear communication. I was very clear on the timelines and what was expected from me from the get go. It also gave me a glimpse of everything that we would be doing in the second year.

Challenges faces:

I think the biggest challenge is the amount of time given for this entire experience. Since, the second year was in her animatic stage, there wasn’t much that she needed me to do. Although, I feel I would have been able to do more had the second year been on a more advanced stage of her film.

New technique/skill learnt:

I think, for me, all of this was an extension of all that we have learnt about character design in the course so far. How to think of different characters in a story and make them work as one. I did not get to animate anything as such because my senior’s film is at a very nascent stage as of now.

How did I use the skills I have learnt so far:

I think the previous answer pretty much covers it.

What will I bring into my practice from this experience?

When we were asked to do a walk cycle, Steve mentioned how we can probably base it around a protest that was going on. Honestly, protests made me think of incompetent leaders and made me think of Trump. I decided to make a Trump-like character(the hair being the highlight) who is walking around wearing a cone of shame.

For a substantial amount of time, I felt that quadruped walk was the most difficult exercise for me. It seemed like I only get two or three feet right at once.

I spent a lot of time working on this, but, happy to announce, I’m kind of getting the hang of it now.

My first attempt made the walk look a little too mechanical. I liked the character as a whole but the walk wasn’t great. The dog’s tail wasn’t very convincing either and felt like it wasn’t moving in sync with the body.

The second attempt I made at quadruped walk cycle was much much better than the first. I had to do a lot of iterations but I eventually understood the mechanism. I had to refer to the anatomy repeatedly and break it down for myself.

One other suggestion that I got from one of my classmates was to look at two legs at once. That helped me to pick and correct things easily.

I also tried my hand at a flying bird animation. I am really fascinated with owls and wanted to animate the whole thing. However, I ended up animating just it’s wing’s movement. Here’s how it went:

This animation encapsulates my feelings on seeing the price tag on TV Paint. Being an animator sure ain’t cheap.

I made this animation on Procreate. As great as software Procreate is, it is a little difficult to ace the timing on Procreate.

I then exported the Procreate file to TVPaint and worked on fixing the timing. Here’s the final result –

I haven’t come up with this character’s name as yet but I was very sure I wanted to design an Indian aunty as soon as this exercise started. I come from a country of different cultures, languages and people and I wanted to make use of that.

Starting with the attire, my character is wearing a traditional saree. However, she has a very interesting story. She grew up in a small orthodox family and got married at an early age. She has a lot of zeal for life and is always up for everything fun. Unlike a lot of people her age, she hasn’t succumbed to the burden of being a housewife and has kept her dreams alive.

She wishes to play in a band someday and carries her drumsticks around in her bun. Utensils, earthen pots, steel plates, bowls, anything and everything is used as drums in the house.

The jumping exercise made me realize the importance of stretching and squashing your characters to add more to the whole animation. It helps exaggerate the whole thing.

I tried animating a jumping hippo. I did not complete the whole exercise but it sure was fun.

The week’s exercise was about animating a jumping animal. Steve ensured that we understood the basics really well and his onesie definitely helped. So, I thought of picking cow as my animal. A chonky cow ofcourse!

I wasn’t entirely happy with this one. I feel I can add more to it so I am going to come back to this again.

Update: I did come back to this and did another version of this exercise which I felt is way better than the cow! This idea hit me when I was talking to my sister one day and she spoke about how she is getting fatter by the day. I drew a sumo to tease her to begin with but immediately realized that I wanted to animate it. Presenting some of my favorite frames and the animation itself.