Photoshop: Animation (Walking In Dreamland)

This task was quite similar to the walk cycle task, however we got to choose a different guide to animate. I chose this cat one, which I found on google images. I then used a mixture of tracing and the puppet warp to recreate the 5 poses from the guide, like how I did the walk cycle. 

Image

The cat animation turned out ok I think, though I do think it could have used a few more poses in the cycle to make it a bit smoother. Also, I wasn't sure how long each pose should last for (Probably should have done some quick research for that) so I just tried different speeds and went with what looked ok. I also made the 'back' paws a darker shade so that they could be distinguished, because that was something I identified from the walk cycle task.

After this I started working on the background. I had the idea of having the background change colours so I made two background layers of different colours and made keyframes for their opacity in the timeline. Once I was happy with how the colours transitioned, I altered the colours slightly using adjustments so the colours were a bit more subtle (Since I had just chosen random colours).

I then worked on making some clouds for the 'floor' and animated them to move, one big difference from the walk cycle animation was that the cat is walking to the left rather than the right, so the 'floor' had to go the opposite way. I also added a second layer of clouds which you can faintly see move about. I'm not super happy with how the floor looks and I would like to redo it if had the time, however the more simple floor was a bit easier to animate.

Timeline

Once I had the basics of the animation complete, I then had to think of what would happen in the animation. Since the task was called walking in dreamland, I had the idea to put some elements from some of my past dreams in the animation. This resulted in the rain and wave in the animation (these could also be interpreted as things that help people sleep, since some people listen to rain/wave noises before bed). I had other elements I would have liked to add, however I didn't want to make the animation too long (for example I once had a dream where a car turned into a boat so I wanted to add something along those lines to the animation). 

I created the rain by looking at a tutorial on google where it said to draw a white dot on a new layer and then use the motion blur at 43? and 90 degrees which created a line which looked like rain, which could be duplicated and animated. I think I could have done a better job at animating/timing the rain, but I think it gives off the effect I wanted it too. I then added the wave using a blank video layer and drawing the wave frame by frame. I also added a rectangle at the bottom to help the wave transition in and out a bit better and to make it look as though the rain caused the wave to happen. 

Overall I think these two elements turned out quite well, I just wish I had done a bit of a better job with the pacing/timing so that they looked a bit more natural, however on the other hand, the speed of these events could be interpreted as the fact that, in dreams, time is sort of non-existent. 

The last event in the animation is some sweets falling from the sky, since I wanted to add an element of the randomness which is often present in dreams. I think I could have executed this much better, since the animation is so quick you can't really see what happens and therefore the message is not conveyed very well. I think if I did some tweaking with the timing, the whole animation would look a lot better.

I also added a sort of sun effect after the wave and between the background colour changing.