Free Inquiry 8; Beautiful Beaver

What Is Animation

Animation is the process of creating the illusion of movement by displaying a sequence of images or frames.

Use In Education

Animation could be used in education to assist with engagement and understanding as it offers easier visualization of a concept, thus appealing to more personal learning styles and turning dry images into a dynamic experience. However, animation often needs pricy resources that may be hard to access, it can take a lot of time to both create and learn, as well as incorporating use into the classroom effectively needs to be aware of avoiding overuse and over simplifying.

Planning

Before starting I was thinking that I will need to do a simple character or object that I can easily manipulate. Then I had to come up with one. I decided I was going to do a wizard with a bit of magic. The next step was determining how I was going to go about this; deciding on using a more stop motion style, then to storyboarding.

I relied strongly on creating ‘keyframes’ of the important and main positions and then adding the in-between connecting bits (tweening).

Resources

2D Animation Basics
Animation With Krita

Storyboarding

Character

I have yet to do much characterization in my digital doodle endeavor, and I did not think I would be overly successful. I think by the end of this I have proved that at least partially wrong, I just needed to realize my expectations from other’s style and work within/around my own (whatever that could turn out to be). Using a simplistic, but still effective, clip art style with a minimal colour pallet seemed to work well for me.

Beaver, Turned Wizard.

The concept of the wizard sort of remained as I progressed. Then when I was getting the preliminary sketch to develop a rough layout I notice the round portion of the body reminded me of a penguin, however, my mum thought it looked like beaver. Then my brother, sticking on the theme of ‘Canadian’ animals, wanted me to draw a moose, and thus Moose the beaver was born.

The Tree-riffic Beaver Called Moose!

Before being able to create the rest of the poses I needed to at least start with a drawing of my character. From altering this I was able to create all of the poses that I needed; whether that be from flipping the image, moving arms, tails, or tilting his head, inserting a hockey stick wand (also a mum and brother requirement), and adding sparkles! ✨

Process Overview

I first used Krita to create the keyframes, other positions, and reference points. Then after organizing in Krita, writing down a list, and downloading each of the individual shots (of which there is ~40 different ones, many repeated) I put them into Clipchamp. Once there I had to gather all of the images and order them, then determined how long I wanted each image to last for (0:00.10). For the waddling portions I needed to manually move and place them along the screen, but otherwise all of the images were centered. The I added a background to add a bit more oomf!