Fish to Dino Animation Practice

The Context

This was done for my 2D Animation class midterm last year. This was strictly speaking an After Effects assignment, and though most of it is just individual frames imported from PhotoShop, I did need a lot of After Effects skills to sew it together.

The Behind-the-Scenes

Frames were "hand drawn" in Photoshop CS5.5 using a Wacom Intuos3 tablet and brought into After Effects CS5.5, except for the carnosaur which was a puppet with pieces drawn in Photoshop and rigged in After Effects. Sounds are from freesound.org.

The original storyboards started at primordial soup and ended at a pair of cockatiels, but after I realized this was a MIDTERM project and not a TERM project I had to cut out acts 1 and 3. O.o Animation takes... a while....

I didn't really do much paleontology research for this but I used to be into dinosaurs like ten years ago and this is based on what I remember.

EDIT: original storyboards available here: [link]

The Ranting

There are mistakes all over the place and I didn't have time to properly synch the sound or add touches like eye blinks during the walk cycles, but I do like the way it looks overall. I also would've liked the running up the tree bit to be a new cycle, but there wasn't time to do it.

The Rejoicing

I was so glad when this was done! And there are bits of it I really, really like, like the running dino animation (after our hero gets startled by the carnosaur).

EDIT: Holy cow a DD?!
Wow, thank you so much ^kingmancheng! I'm delighted by everyone's enjoyment of this little short. :3