Wednesday 18th September 2013

Frame by frame animation loop

For this exercise we needed to create a frame by frame animation loop.

Before we began the animation we were shown a few examples to get an understanding on what is meant by an animation loop. An animation loop is a short animation that has a character or an object do an action and is able to play over and over again seemlessly. An example of this would be a character entering one side of the stage and leaving on the other side. We were shown some aniamtion loops created by Andy Martin and then given a tutorial on frame by frame animation and the onion skin tool in Adobe Flash CS6.

Andy Martin - Mini Sketchbook Animations (http://vimeo.com/6491362)

Onion skin is a tool in Adobe Flash CS6 that allows you to see previous and upcoming frames at the same time. This helps with animating, a lot with frame by frame drawings, as you can see the positions of your animation at different stages. When doing frame by frame animation this helps you see where the animation is whilst you draw the next frame.

This shows how you can see previous frames whilst working on the animation.

The highlighted box is the onion skin tool.

The frame by frame animation I done was of a moon orbiting the Earth. I also added a few shooting stars in as the scenery didn't have anything there.