2D Hand
In our 7th week of Animation production we were given a brief, for this brief we had to: investigate the anatomy of the human hand, develop a design of a hand with at least three fingers and a thumb, and to have the hand lifting and dropping an object.
I have always found drawing the human hand difficult- I can draw a hand however it always took me too long to draw one up. Luckily for me, this week in drawing practise we had been taught a range of techniques on drawing hands, one of these techniques that stuck out to me was the 'Mitten technique'. The idea behind the mitten technique was to build up shapes that resembled a mitten, then break the mitten-shape down to create fingers, the pictures below show the mitten technique and my attempt of this technique.
Before the mitten technique, I would draw hands by creating messy shapes which would often lead to a lot of trial and error. I am glad that I was introduced to this technique, it helped me a lot during the animation process. For my animation I decided to have the hand throwing and catching a ball, I chose to have a ball as the object because it meant that I could also progress my squash and stretch in animation. Before animating, I decided to record my own hand dropping and catching a ball, I done because by having some primary reference it would help with animating the hand's anatomy. The video below shows my recording.
For the animation, I used the software Toon Boom Harmony. Prior to animating, I put my reference video into Photoshop so I could use the frames as reference to make the form of my hand look realistic, the screenshot below shows an example of one of the frames I used as reference.
The video below shows the final product of my 2D Hand, after I had animated the hand I transferred the video into Photoshop and placed a 'bubble popping', I done this to mimic the 'ping pong' noise from the ball in my reference video. Overall I do like how the animation had turned out, I was afraid of the hand looking stiff and lifeless but luckily the animation looks smooth. I believe this is because I had reference for my hand, if I didn't have reference the form of the hand would look uncanny. If I could go back and change anything about my animation, I would probably have managed my time better so I could have the chance of adding colour to the hand.
Initially I was unsure about adding lines on top of the ball and hand to emphasise the movement, so I created a version of the animation without the lines, as shown in the video below. However, after seeing both videos side by side I am glad to have added lines on top of the hand and ball, it makes the movement in the video seem a lot more dramatic.