This week was completely dedicated to the rough animation: making sure all the basic movements were down for the clean-up. Personally, I like making my roughs fairly clean, so the clean-up process is made easier (even if still time-consuming), so this took the whole week (plus two days of the following one).

I wanted my little character to be very cartoony and expressive, so I tried using some smear frames on the faster movements to emphasize the speed and “cartoony-ness” of his actions. It took some trial and error, but I’m happy with how they all ended up looking.

I also made a conscious effort to think of the twelve principles of animation when working, to make it as clean of a project as possible: follow-through and overlap with the different limbs, anticipation for the wider movements, slow-ins and -outs to make it more appealing, and exaggeration to reinforce the cartoon-y nature of the character.

To make the process easier on myself, I cleaned up the keyframes from my animatic before doing any of the roughs, so as to have a base to work off of. For some movements, this proved to be very useful, as the main body stays still and only has a few details (a limb, or the eye) move around, which saved me a lot of time.

There were only two movements in the animation where the entire body moves around, and those certainly took up a lot of time, but I still made sure to keep them as clean as possible to ensure an easier clean-up later on.

I’m now officially done with the rough animation, so the next step is completing the clean-up. At this point, I’m certain I’ll reach the deadline comfortably.