It's been a while...

I've been pretty busy lately so I forgot about my blog for a time, so it's time to get back on track, well try too. My second module was that of 2.5D animation, now to give a brief explanation as to what exactly 2.5D animation is, it's 2D animation within a 3D environment, at first the concept was confusing and honestly hard to grasp, I had used Cinema 4D, the program which we were to use to animate, in the past but never to such a degree where it involved frame by frame animation, only very simplistic box movement animation.

So then with this said how did I eventually execute the final animation, well, I looked into some 2.5D animation, "Cowtastrophe" by Aaronkimatnimation was the first piece I looked at, though to be honest this piece is more of a cut-out animation based though still served as inspiration and a guideline as to what COULD be achieved.


The second animation I looked at was by Sophie Durand, what I particularly like how Durand approached the fore, middle and background, it has a very watercolour-esc approach and I really liked how it had been approached and something which I considered taking inspiration from. The separation in layer's and object's is apparent though at this point I was looking to replicate the look and feel of old Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry Cartoons so therefore I didn't take into account all possibilities due to my own narrow mindedness which, spoiler, led to my downfall within the module.

"Washerbots" was the third piece I looked at by Sumo Science, though not overly detailed the animation retains a charm about it, it could be better, the lack of detail or colour brings down the overall standard and the animation comes off as being half-arsed, that's not to say it's bad, the premise is clever but it could've been so much more.

The next piece is by Fons Schiedon, at first I didn't like Schiedon's work, I saw it as too simplistic however, it's his work which has inspired me quite heavily and I'll talk about how later on. "Little Bright Eyes" blends 2D and 3D together really well, the 3D environment isn't incredibly detailed whereas the main character is, what this allows is for the attention to be primarily on him and because of that more effort is applied to his movement, it isn't static, quite the opposite, it's very fluent. This is an aspect that needs to be taken into account for future work.

The final piece I looked at was Adherent, though not a big fan of the overall style, the approach to 2.5D animation was clever and at the time shared similarities to the story of my 2.5 animation, the characters are really nicely detailed though the segmented black outlines of each individual limb of the character is something which always annoys me and some I try and avoid, it always looks off to me and detracts from the overall look and feel though that said, if that IS the style then for what it is, it's very good and the sense of depth within the 2D world is very nicely done.

So these were some of the things I looked at to get a general grasp as to what 2.5D animation was and it gave me some incentive as to what was to be achieved, however, things didn't go as I planned...