The Animated Self: My Chosen Idea and Getting Started

I decided I wanted to create a 15-30 second animation of someone dancing, more precisely my sister. I wanted to have her wear a floaty skirt and dance around a space so that I could practice drawing realistic human movements, as well as animating follow through and overlapping actions. Before I asked her to film a reference video for me, I searched on Youtube for something that I/she could take inspiration from when it came to dancing around.

I didn't really find much of relevance, but then I stumbled across this video. It wasn't much help in terms of content but it did give me the idea to have Maressa (my sister) dance around the garden and emerge from behind trees as if she were in some sort of forest. 

When we started to shoot the videos, it didn't occur to me that the tea towel was going to obstruct the shot of Maressa prancing around. It was only until I saw her disappear behind it that I realised we would have to shoot another shot. I went to stop and move the tea towel out of the way, but by that point Maressa had used it as a prop and pushed it out of the way as if it was a bunch of tree branches/vines. She thought because I hadn't moved it out of the way that I wanted her to interact with it, so a simple mistake lead to a great idea. I kept the tea towel where it was and shot a couple of takes of her dancing around and interacting with the scenery. 

Chosen Reference Video (Rendered at 12FPS)

I then chose my favourite video out of the collection for me to work from, and uploaded it into Photoshop to change the frame rate. From here I could have easily Rotoscoped the sequence, and I was very tempted, but I decided that because I was out of practice with traditional animation that this would be the best thing for me to go for. I had also experienced Rotoscoping with my Applied Animation project so I thought it would be a good idea to try and keep the projects different.

Initial Plan

Before I got started with drawing, I planned out a 16:9 space and in it had a rough sketch of what I wanted the scene to look like. This meant I wouldn't have to struggle later at cropping down the image and trying to work out where she was going to interact with things. I made sure to have these frames at the bottom of my peg board, so I could animate Maressa over the top of them.