For my simulated work experience, I was assigned to Ace Romanova, who was working on a 2D animation. After a quick meeting with her where she explained what she wanted her film was about, I was given three short scenes to create rough animations for: one short walk cycle, and two close-up shots. Her animatic and storyboard were provided alongside to give a sense of context to the scenes I was working on.

I started with the walk cycle, as it was something I was familiar with doing, as well as being the most complicated of the three. Because of this, I did first film a reference video for the walk, and then used this along with the proportions of the character from the animatic to create a basic walk cycle.

Partway through, I realised that the character had a specific position and pose that she would have to end at, and had to go back through my frames to mark out the position that each foot would have to step on in order for the animation to make sense. This will be a helpful thing to remember in the future to be more efficient when animating, especially when the end position of a walk cycle is fixed for blocking and story purposes.

The two close-up shots were animated without much issue, especially as I also acted out the movements several times to understand the motion better.

Overall, I really appreciated how organised my second year was, which made it easier for both of us to communicate and keep on track of the progress. Because she had already completed her animatic with all the scenes timed out, I could easily reference it to gather necessary information about how long I should animate each movement.

This was my first time animating someone else’s ideas, and while I was initially a little nervous about the process and hoping my work could meet their expectations, it ended going very smoothly. It helped that I was only tasked to complete the roughs, instead of also having to do clean-up, as I wasn’t very confident with my clean-up abilities, especially in the style of another animator. This is, however, something that I hope to work on, starting with cleaning-up my own animations, before also becoming more comfortable with using character sheets to clean up other people’s characters and animations.

I had a lot of fun learning about the films that Ace, as well as the other second-years were working on, and it’s gotten me to start thinking about what I might want my final film to be about. I thoroughly enjoyed working on the rough animations, and I’m looking forward to animating many other films in the future!