According to the Chinese zodiac, 2022 is the year of the tiger. I felt that this was the best opportunity for me to animate a little something for it.
I prefer a LOT of colours in my designs and hence chose this colour scheme. I’m pretty happy with the results.
I try to sometimes stay back at the café I work at and draw random people or draw from references.
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.
When I started working on this presentation, I had very vague idea about the animation industry back home. It is majorly because India doesn’t have an established animation culture as yet.
On research, I realised there are a couple of reasons for it.
Animation sector is dwarfed by its giant neighbors and identity formation has been difficult. For instance, Japan has Manga which is globally recognised. Also, outsourcing represents the majority of the entertainment animation industry. High costs of production is another reason for the lack of home-grown movies.
Ram Mohan was an animator and educator considered to be the father of Indian animation.
One of the major reasons for picking this animator was not only because of his contribution to the animation industry but because he paved the way for a lot of current animators in India. He emphasised on the need of an infrastructure and an animation culture and mentored a lot of artists.
He got a chance to train under Disney animator Clair Weeks in 1956,when the Cartoon Unit of the new government Films Division was set up. It is important to note here that did have an animation culture even in the pre-independence era, i.e., before 1947 but it was majorly categorized under “experiments”. Shadow-puppet animation and hand painted glass slides were used as long back as the 19th century but we had the Mughals ruling us and then the Brits for 100 years, so content creation was very restrictive.
Ram Mohan passed on in 2019, however he has left behind a legacy and has inspired a lot of new-age animators. There is a small but vocal group of animators who have taken it upon themselves and are trying to create innovative content. One such Animator is Vaibhav Kumaresh who is the founder of Kumar Studios. I had reached out to him with a couple of questions to understand the situation better.
One of the big questions was: What are the challenges you face in India as an animator? To which he replied, “In my case, the biggest challenge is to create and distribute high quality original Indian animated content – be it within India or abroad. And most importantly – do it in a financially successful and sustainable manner.”
The other question that he had answered was, What are your parameters for judging an animation? His answer was quite extensive but the crux of it according to him was, “Effective and unique storytelling, good command over the production quality, sound design and music”
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.
I have never been in the habit of maintaining a sketchbook. Being in a corporate job prior to this, I always had a laptop and ipad on me all the time so it was simpler and more convenient to use the resources at my disposal. I definitely want to do more sketching and here’s something that I started with.