Acting for Animation: 5 Second Club

When I first heard about the 5 second club task, I was excited, as I had very recently animated an OneyPlays fan animation and I had really enjoyed the process of animating to fit with specific audio.

My fan animation which features an audio clip from OneyPlay’s Minecraft Series. I animated this in FlipaClip on my iPad using an Apple Pencil.

I decided that I would animate my 5 second club animation in FlipaClip on my iPad, as it has a built in feature that allows you to import audio and animate intuitively alongside the audio. I really liked the audio clip “well I hardly think that’s any of your business”- as soon as I heard it, I immediately pictured a smug talking cat. I came up with the basic narrative of an angry looking owner pointing to a poop on the carpet, with the camera switching to the cat, who responds with the chosen line.

I really love the humour in this animation, and the use of boiling.

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I really love the humour in this animation, and the use of boiling.

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Storyboard Sketches

I really like how fluid the animation is in this clip from the simpsons. I can picture my cat character moving like this, so he will probably be animated frame by frame.

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I really like how fluid the animation is in this clip from the simpsons. I can picture my cat character moving like this, so he will probably be animated frame by frame.

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When I was animating the OneyPlays animation, I used flipaclip’s default setting of 12 frames per second. Because of this, I was able to draw the frame, trace it once, and then alternate between the two frames, animating mouth movements and other gestures on each frame. However, I noticed that this approach to boiling didn’t really work for a project using 24 frames per second. When I alternated one frame with the other, the result was incredibly distracting, kind of like strobe lighting. I experimented with alternating 3 copies of the one frame, but this looked slow. I eventually settled on 2 copies of each frame alternating against each other.

3 copies of a frame, alternating with 3 copies of the traced frame.
2 copies of a frame, alternating with 2 copies of the traced frame.

After I figured out how I would approach the boiling technique, I began drawing stink/heat lines rising from the cat poop. I changed the movement of the wiggly lines on each frame. After showing this to a friend, he commented that the lines looked like they were moving way too fast. I then realised I would need to animate the lines on each second frame, not frame by frame. This way the movement of the lines would match the movement of the environment.

Super speedy stink lines
Slightly slower stink

At this point I had the animation roughly finished. However, I noticed a few things that needed fixing (aside from the lines of the background moving with the cat’s head as he jerked his head forwards). Some feedback I received was the fact that I had used too many mouth movements on the cat. Another realisation was that the paw I drew in the storyboard was missing- it would be essential for adding more character and attitude to the cat. I also realised that the stink lines should still be present above the poop when the camera zooms out to show the owner.

I found this page from the animator’s survival kit particularly helpful when solving the problem of too many mouth shapes in my cat’s dialogue. I removed some of the mouth shapes after realising that I was making the mistake of trying to animate each letter. (“The Animator’s Survival Kit”, Richard Williams, 2001. Page 308.)

The rough animation

I fixed the issues outlined above, but still something wasn’t right. I showed the video to my tutor and others, and all agreed that the paw animation could be snappier.

The more polished animation
I changed the motion of the paw to move up on the phonetics “bi” and “ne”. I felt that this worked better for emphasising the sass in the word “businesses”.

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Reflective thoughts

Looking back on this project, I would have liked to have added colour to my characters. I also think if I were to do it again, I would use different software for creating the animation. Flipaclip is an excellent app, especially for the cheap price. However drawing lines on the ipad is quite difficult- the lines tend to look quite squiggly due to how the apple pencil has very little friction against the ipad screen. However that being said, I really enjoyed my dive into 2D animation, and overall I enjoyed creating animations on my ipad.

I am also quite happy with how my characters fit with the audio- I think the voice works really well with the smug aura of the cat, and I think creating my OneyPlay’s animation helped greatly in terms of developing an understanding of lipsynching.