Hopefully 2021 is better than 2020! Since there are no parties this year, I followed Bee Grandenetti's skillshare class and made a dancing loop to celebrate instead.
This short animation was drawn by hand, which means I had to draw every frame. This method is often called Traditional Animation because this is how animations were originally created. Most animators today, however, use computers to help create animations, so we don't need to laboriously draw every frame.
But sometimes there are things that are just easier to do by hand. And I think the hand drawn look is really appealing and charming. Still, it's. a lot of work even for a very short animation. Below is a video outlining the three main steps, as directed by Bee in her class:
Take a reference video of somebody dancing and create a character based on that
Use computer animation to roughly time the animation
Work frame by frame to create the outlines
Color and finish!
Here is a video showing the three final phases of animation:
Happy New Year!