This course was taken during my sophomore year and was designed to present some of the basic skills necessary to produce successful 2D hand-drawn animations. These basic skills include the art and techniques of hand-drawn animation, immersion in a variety of techniques exploring founding principles of animation, storytelling, drawing, and design.

Animation #6, Dialogue

This was the final project of the course where we animated a character speaking a short line of dialogue. The boy and the bee are the same characters from the Anticipation animation(#3), where the boy was on a pool floaty.

Animation #5, Animated Background

For this assignment, we had to create a looping animation that contained three animated elements on an animated background, while also conveying a strong sense of mood. This was the first animation where we used the masking tool to put the elements together rather than drawing everything on each frame.

Animation #4, Character Study

The focus of this animation was to display good use of the follow-through and overlapping principles of animation in a character study of a character sitting down in a chair. The concept for mine is of a little boy playing dress-up who accidentally snags his “cape” in the wheels of his chair and falls over. As he walks across the room, he stops to pose and we see how he imagines himself as someone older with longer hair.

Animation #3, Anticipation

The focus of this animation was to demonstrate the principles of timing and spacing, and anticipation. The primary inspiration for this piece was the Coyote and Roadrunner skits from Merry Melodies. Both characters of the boy and the bee are seen again in the Dialogue animation(#6), which acts as a follow-up to the events that happened in this animation.

Animation #2, Straight-Ahead and Pose-to Pose

The focus of this animation was to display good use of squash and stretch using a simple ball-like character and animate the same sequence twice both in straight-ahead and pose-to-pose methods. For this assignment, I drew a happy little cherry whose stem isn’t just for show.

Animation #1, Flipbook

Our first assignment in the class was to create a flipbook animation that was 100 notecards long and was to tell something about ourselves. For my flipbook, I wanted to convey my love for classic rock using logos and symbols associated with some of the bands I like, my hobby of playing video games by showing the symbols from a Playstation controller, and where I was from by showing the skyline of my hometown which is Louisville, Kentucky. Unfortunately, I do not have a digital copy of this because we did not submit them online, but I hope to upload the flipbook at some point in the future.