Ok here is the animatic for my entry to the Dance-Off Challenge:

I am working on an entry for the Dance Off animation challenge at the animation forum which is due on the 15th. Here is a little storyboard for the fun of it.

What’s a dance without a little bit of monkey business?

Here is an update on the dancer, I added a turn to make the loop a little bit more interesting.

What did I learn?

• It makes it a lot easier to draw the stick figure if I think of which leg is supporting the body and exerting force while the figure is turning.

I am participating in the DanceOff Challenge on the animationforum, here is a test of a dancer I did:

What did I learn?

• Dance animation is quite complicated (for a beginner), so I simplified the figure and animated the hips like a pendulum and then added the legs, torso,arms and head.
• In Flash it helps to use the pencil tool and be really rough (I tried the brush tool but it doesn’t keep up with my quick gestural lines, don’t know if this is to do with Flash or the speed of my machine). I did the poses for the extremes and then added inbetweens until the timing looked right. Once the rough layer moved well, I made that layer a Guide and created a new layer where I drew a clean line using the brush tool.

Here is a freelance flash project that I finished recently. It is for the Open Intelligence Agency and I was subcontracted by Mesa to create the blinking squid animation and also the movement of the tentacles.

Originally the client wanted a wind effect in the tentacles which you can see in this post, but at the end they decided to go with an up and down motion. The animation of the tentacles is done using actionscript with a spring and constraint simulation, the blinking is done by hand with the timing determined by actionscript.