Donkey Steps

Today was a productive day.

After my recent commissioned animation of a My Little Pony styled version of the client's donkey character, I was brought back for round two! I've been dying to do some straight up animation and this project is going to be a whoooole lot of fun to work on.

I'm still trying to cut down on the time spent during the drafting phase, and after a quick storyboard session with the client, I hopped into flash and drew up the guidelined frames for the main character's walk animation. equine legs are SO DUMB. I was headbutting so many refs for so long... I just seriously wish i have something that's at least close before i begin working on the lines and colors!:

At this point the head and body are generally unmoving, and after sectioning off the foreground legs, background legs, body, and head to different layers I can work on getting things a bit more lively. I started from scratch with this animation because I made a couple mistakes with my previous one and starting with a clean slate was ideal for fixing everything at once.

The parts that I have drawn in are grouped off, but almost every frame is redrawn. I mostly use grouping to handle character heads and much easier post animation adjustments. After polishing things up a bit, I have a basic walk animation for the donkey. I don't know much about MLP, but after seeing a lot of fan art floating around the net it appears each pony has some sort of symbol.

I will be checking with the commissioner to see what symbol he wants. Here is the current status of the walk animation. I still need to add in a symbol, and any other details I may have missed after reviewing with the commissioner:

Finalized walk animations for both characters and possibly some lip syncing coming soon! The voice samples I've received so far have me all excited!

Until then..have the result of my character study of Spike:

I got a little carried away...so did he. We'll see where this goes at a later date.