LoopdeLoop - Responsive

For this months Loopdeloop they have released the theme 'cute' and I thought this would be a fun idea for an animation. I've never created a looping animation before so I wanted to keep my idea simple.

I started off by brainstorming cute things and what actually makes something 'cute'.





























I then created different mood boards to start my ideas flowing for what I wanted my animation to look like. I decided that I wanted to use a panda as mr 'cute' character for this animation and I wanted to look at the different colours I want to use. I looked at different colour palettes that represented the 'cute' feel, although I still wanted to keep it natural colours in keeping with my Panda.

Below is another mood board that I made around sleepy pandas and I started to come up with an idea of animating a sleeping panda.



I wanted to have my Panda lay out quite funnily like the video above so that it makes the animation a little comical too. So I started sketching characters and different positions I wanted my panda to lay in, I didn't actually feel I needed a storyboard for this animation and it was a very simple loop of a panda sleeping with little movement. The animation goes that the panda is sleeping, blows a snot bubble which wakes him up before snoozing off again.

Here are my sketches:

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Here are some of my Photoshop drawings:

You can see the similarities from my sketches and I used a certain brush to make him look fluffy.

I put little specks of yellow and green on his fur so that he blended a little into my background and it looked like reflections.

This background I created was informed from my mood board on colour as well as looking at digital artwork that included the glow lights effect. These are a couple of tutorials I followed that I found from Pinterest.

Final Animation:

Sleepy Panda - 'Cute' Loop - Loopdeloop from Stacy Straub on Vimeo.

Overall, I quite like my animation that I produced and it met the deadline way ahead of time and kept with all of the requirements. However, to challenge myself I could next time go for a little more complicated narrative rather than little to no movement. I mainly wanted to try a different digital style with this animation and I do feel that I achieved this. Although I am interested in stop-motion and other types of animation, I think that it's necessary to keep up my digital animation skills and carry on developing them so that I can have knowledge on all the different mediums. As Loopdeloop is quite a simple brief I don't see why I can't try on a regular basis to enter the challenge as it's great practice for trying out different mediums. Within this animation when the Panda breathes I feel it's a little too fast and to tackle this I could have added more frames when animating, this is due to my own learning within timing and spacing and creating little animations such as this allows me to figure out the common mistakes I make. I do however think I've developed my digital painting a lot more with this project, which helps when thinking about the different styles I could use for future animations.