Recently I picked up an impulsive desire to start animating. As I’ve been getting into using Adobe Illustrator more and more something in the back of my mind has been asking what it would take to bring my drawings to life. It mostly began with animated GIFs and as I saw how the process went the urge grew.
When creating a poster concept for an upcoming show I looked at the character I was working on and said to myself, “this needs to move.” So I started animating the old fashioned way: hand drawing, cell-by-cell.
You can see the hand drawn work in the gallery above with the three animations featuring the penguin and the monkey. All three of those concept pieces were animated by hand in Illustrator and transferred into Photoshop. It was a lot of work. A lot more than I expected at first. Originally I created around 30 frames because I wasn’t sure how many I would need, which was too much work, but eventually I narrowed it down to about ten frames. Sill, it was a lot of effort for a short animation.
Long story short: I ended up learning After Effects, thanks to YouTube, and created the short, ten second logo animation for my tiny print shop you see above and had a hell of a lot of fun doing it. I think I might have a new favorite.
Copyright © 2016 Robert C. Olson
Robert C. Olson 