Every afternoon except Sundays I am online teaching students for Elite Animation Academy. Today was the last class for a student and this is the character she wanted to animate. I thought I should share an example of the types of scenes we work on. this must be a character from a video game my student plays. The assignment integrates squash and stretch, fast and slow movements incorporating slow in and slow out, arcs, a change of expression and a blink and creating a cycle. The flower pedals incorporate drag and some follow through. As simple as the assignment looks it incorporated quite a few of the 12 major animation principles. I like to follow the student’s interests which means I get introduced to a whole lot of characters and culture I wouldn’t otherwise get exposed too.
Since this was a final project, I wanted the student to push the scene to a more final look by using color and a background. The reference the student showed me had the simple grey background so I went with that. I enjoy teaching animation online. I go over the same 12 principles each time but each student inspires me to push each assignment in a new direction to match their interests.
This is a bit of a departure from my sharing my illustrative journalism work, but every afternoon when most events are beginning, I am in my studio online teaching a student. This student wanted to include an audio clip with her animation in Procreate, but the program doesn’t have an audio feature. I use a program called Callipeg and it does allow for audio clips, so with more ambitious students I sometimes have a short dialogue clip to work on. By short, I mean one word, like “no!” which could be finished in one two hour class.