Mermaid
Click for animation to play.
Rough animation
I’ve wanted to animate mermaids for a while now. I really looked forward to animating the flowy movements of body parts in water.
Fishy test
I thought to be smart and animate and model a fish, to paint over in Ebsynth, but animating it in 3D turned out to be no fun for me… So, I gave up on that idea and animated fishes frame by frame instead.
Colourboards
coming up with a fitting colour theme proved challenging. I really love the darker more edgy boards, but since I wanted to use the animation to say thanks and welcome to my new followers on Instagram, I wanted the atmosphere to be positive. In hind sight, I wish I went for one of the more darker themes. That would’ve been more interesting to me.
Stickybones
To give the feeling of depth I wanted the character to move further away in space in relation to the camera. A neat opportunity to use my Stickybones model to roughly plan out her movement!
Backgrounds
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- Thumbnail
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- Ai generated based on thumbnail
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- Overpaint
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- Thumbnail
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- AI generated based on thumbnail
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- Overpaint
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- Thumbnail
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- AI generated based on thumbnail
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- Overpaint Background
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- Overpaint foreground
For this project, I wanted to incorporate AI so I could focus on animating. It’s a lovely tool, especially if you feed it your own base image to start from and paint over it afterwards. I think for us filmmakers it’s a really neat way to generate ideas quickly. Especially if you don’t have the resources a large studio has.
thoughts
As an aspiring 2D animation director I was ashamed to say I hated actually animating. I enjoy establishing a vision, working on the story, and researching and developing the early stages for a project the most. Lately however, I’ve been rediscovering my love for the act of animating itself. I hope to create more of these couple seconds long short scènes like this mermaid animation and my Annora animation. I’m considering it a warm-up for my larger project, Pupatinea.