R.I.P, dear tablet-pen. 24th Dec 2008 – 12th Mar 2014. I’m sad to see you go. You will be missed.
This past week I’ve been working on animating a short intro sequence to our game. We want to have this short intro so that the player doesn’t spawn in this unknown environment without any idea of what they’re doing there, but rather feel like he or she is waking up in an unknown place, and also to quickly introduce the games’ big monster and the idea that you should run away from it.
It feels great to be animating a human, and it’s a fun challenge to be animating in a top-down perspective. I mostly use myself as a reference, and tend to walk or run around the room between animating to feel the movement as it helps me with how the character should move, instead of just guessing. For example, in this intro sequence the character wakes up on the ground, picks up a candle and then stands up. Instead of just animating it, guessing on how it looks like, I’ve been lying on the floor, getting up and laying down again in order to see and feel where I put my feet and hands when getting up. More than once I’ve had the other members of my group help me out by quickly also trying out the movement. It helps a lot, and I always recommend trying out the movement for yourself when you’re not sure of how it looks, and even when you think that you know what it looks like. If you’ve got problems or find it hard to feel the movement, ask someone to record a video of you when you go through the movement, and use that as a reference.
When starting on this animation, I created a few key poses, key frames, and quickly began adding a few in-betweens (frames – still images – between the key frames) to get the illusion of movement.
I’ll mostly be doing the rough animations for the intro, and when the movement is done, my fellow graphical artist Anita will be the one to flesh it out with volumes, as she’s the one that mainly has been working on the player-character. This way I can animate the intro, and she’ll be able to paint on top of my frames so that the style of the character remains the same. The end-frame of the character standing up is the player-characters’ idle pose, created by Anita.
After getting the basic movement right, it was mostly a matter of adding more in-betweens to get the animation to flow nicely. When I finished this first part of the intro sequence I handed it over to Anita, and begun working on the second part, using the same technique with trying out the movement and then animating it. You’ll get more updates on the second part next week.
Until then I hope that you all have a great week! Keep up the great work everyone!
MPh out.
Liten Skåning 
Hello Jonna!
My condolences on the tragic loss of your pen! It’s great that you looked a lot at the real life movement of waking up and rising to your feet, it really shows in the quality of the animation! I especially like the part you added, where the character looks around him/herself before grabbing the candle, it tells a lot about the setting of the game in a clean and simple way.
It is impressive that you have managed to work together with your fellow artist with the animation, that is a great way to work in order to get unity in the overall graphic in the game.
I like that you describe your workflow in the detailed way that you do, because I still have a lot to learn when it comes to animation, it’s great to see how others work. I do recognize myself in what you wrote about “feeling” the movement! I’m also moving all over the place when I do animations, I agree that it’s the best way to go about it!
I look forward to seeing the complete animation in the final version of the game! I think you have done a great job with it! Keep it up, and good luck!
[…] second part of the intro as soon as I finished the sketch animation for the first part. As with the first part of the intro I began by testing the movement a couple of times, turning quickly and backing up. I […]