Animating with Forms (Week 9)

This week we were learning how to animate different forms on the software Krita. This was my first time using Lrita and I had heard from my lectures and students within the different years of animation, that the top two favourite software’s were Krita and Maya. I was eager to learn how to animate within Krita and practice the different tools and animation methods that could be used within Krita ans that are different from other animation software’s. However I worried I would have the same difficulties as I had previously had with Adobe Animate, as I am new to studying animation and the different software’s used to help us create and process our drawings into a animation. I previously had some difficulties managing the amount of information which we had got within our first animation lecture and was concerned the problems which I had with Adobe Animate were going to be identical within Krita and I was going to have two software’s which I struggled to use and have to regularly practice in order to get a good understanding and an ability to use it professionally.

Once we had set up our Wacom tablet and had installed Krita onto the Mac computers I was surprisingly much more comfortable with beginning a lecture with the software Krita as even from appearance, the software looked a lot more easier to understand, the tools such as layers, keyframes and onion skinning were easier to spot and apply to a animation and overall the beginning process was a lot more easier. This could be that Krita was in fact a much more suitable software for me to use and that the short time period of time I had got to practice with Adobe Animate, had in fact encouraged my memory of remembering the different steps of creating an animation on the computer.

Our first task was to animate a simple form of a flour bag and have it joining together or moving in which ever way we wanted. This was my first attempt of a jumping animation, as I had played around with a couple of drawings beforehand and I think for a first to it was a lot easier and more successful.

After this I decided to experiment a bit with animation on Krita and created a short animation of a troll holding a balloon and having it escape and pop on a tree. I can tell this animation needs more frames per second and to be slowed down, but I am happy with the slow progress I am making so far.

After our lectures for animation, we were given the final opportunity to change worlds and this time instead of Alec change the dynamics of each group. It was for each person to decide whether they would like to continue within their group and stay within their worlds, their characters and who are happy to be completing their final task within their world. Or if there was anyone who’s has been interested within their accompanying worlds or the world which they originated from and would like to opportunity to return and continue the semesters last task within this world. The world I had previously began in was ‘Snail World’ and I had then a few weeks in been moved to another world called ‘Material World’ were I had stayed up until this point. So far within Material World I had really enjoyed the concept and characters I had created and was finding it much more interesting than snail world. I was pretty sure I was probably going to stay in this group and complete whatever the last task was, however once all the names of the worlds were announced and we were given the opportunity to change, the world ‘Dream World’ had caught my attention. I had gone over the Michael within the group and was nervous to leave a good group of three were I knew what I was doing and where the world was going, to move to a bigger group of five people all including Kerrie, Michael, Matthew, Oisin, Aveline and begin the entire process of learning the dynamics of a new world. Once I had gotten the brisk analogy of Dream World and how they had the idea of everyone creating their own dream world, a partnering character of cats and a double world reality, I was confident that I would enjoy this world a lot more.

The final task we were assigned within our new worlds and to end the semester before the Christmas break, was to create a short five second animations on the world and its characters. We were given the choice of having any character and storylines for our dreams, but were also delivered the choice that everyone within our group could create a combined animation story and that it may benefit our group more. Upon hearing this information the entire group began to brainstorm ideas and through brain storming we had all decided for the story of animating our characters dreaming their worst nightmare. The idea for this concept was that we would all follow the same style of girl for our character having the same hair colour, clothes and even having the same reappearing Easter egg of the girls cat. The cat was going to change from story to story but be each of our characters guide through the dream awakening within their own nightmares, the character would then have to endure their terror just for a while longer before their dream escalated and they awoke, in their bed and having it only be a dream. I thought this idea was really interesting and was something that I was really going to enjoy designing, creating and seeing come to life within a animation, just to then have a snippet of everyone’s different work, animated and cut together to create the complete, final and team work animation of ‘Dream/Nightmare World’.