Sammy the Schnauzer Character design - Balázs Szabó

Sammy the Schnauzer Character design

Critical analysis

Part of my professional practice module was to create a self-initiated short animation apart from “Craft Friday!” and the “ESCG logo’s morph”. Also, part of the professional practice module was to deliver a pitch. In this pitch there is a hero character called “Sammy” the schnauzer who is a puppy as well as a Christmas present for a young girl who suffers from cerebral palsy and the social isolation it comes with.

 

-The original idea of the character was given by Ryan who provided me with the brief, but I thought I re-draw it by hand and change some aspects like the shape of his body and the Christmas decoration bow on the top of his/her head to make him original.

-I then scanned this drawing in and coloured it in on Animate CC, by using the “Colour bucket” tool and the “paint brush” tool.

Again, creating the key frames before the start of the animation is important because that allows me to create frames that will make the still image move.

I then broke the image apart with the “Break apart” option, and separated Sammy’s tail which I then made into a “Graphic symbol” afterwards.

After this point it enabled me to rotate and flip Sammy’s tail in order to make it move in each frame, to create the motion of a wiggly tail, with using the “free transform” tool.

Using the “brush” tool, I managed to achieve Sammy’s blinking, by re drawing the eyes in some of the frames gradually closing, and reversing that.

Overall, I’m getting comfortable in using Animate CC. I limited myself in this case because I tend to over complicate ideas often and that makes it unachievable to create anything.

Looking forward to make more progress using this software in the near future.