Final Animation

Here's my completed animation as it would run without the clicking/interactive element. I will provide the interactive swf. file on disk since neither Blogger nor Youtube support that file format.

I added the extra frame just before the yelp and I think the slight pause it adds makes it look a lot better. Overall I'm pleased with how its all turned out, and I think it flows together well. Once the animation was finished I played around a little with colour and the paper effect, keeping the simple, mostly-white-with-only-patches-of-colour style of the 'There She Is!!' music videos in mind. I created a new layer in Photoshop and set the blending mode to Multiply so that the paper would still show through, then coloured in the eyes, nose, patches, tail, and ears in different shades of grey; then flattened the image and colourised it, giving it a pale blue hue. I quite like this effect, but it seems a little too obvious that it was done in Photoshop... I really want to keep the piece looking as hand drawn as possible, as though the character I've just finished doodling has suddenly come to life and started moving on its own, rather than me having spent a great deal of time carefully animating it.

I also tried deleting the paper background around the character to see if the contrast between the bright white background and the papery character would be a nice effect, but again, it just seemed to detract from the 'doodle coming to life on paper' feel. I also think the lack of paper background makes it look sparse and empty... I could create an entirely new background in Flash, but I feel the sharp vector images would clash with the nice roughness of the hand-drawn character... To be honest, I found myself really missing the way the paper background flickered as though moving, due to the light of the scanner. As plain and simple as it is, I think the paper is what makes this animation personal to me, and I'd like to keep that in tact. I also found an example of how having the background the same colour and texture as your character can work well to show the world they live in, even if that colour is white:



In my character's case, his world is the world inside my paper.

Below is the small test I did just with the run cycle to show the possibility, but I'm going to keep the final piece in greyscale with the paper background.