Idle Animation

Here's the first animation, traced from live footage of myself.  It's me looking around.

Rotoscoping

In this course, I'll be making a collection of 2D sprite animations for a character in a video game.  There's a particular style of animation called rotoscoping that's been around for a while, and I'm interested in trying it for myself.  Rotoscoping is a technique in which animators trace over live-action footage for use in various digital media, such as animated films or games (in my case, they will be 2D sprites).  This brings a particular realism to the animation, which can be very difficult to pull off when just drawing the frames from scratch.

There are some famous examples of this, such as Mortal Kombat.  The characters look like actual people, even though they're really just 2D sprites.

Another good example is Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, one of the most underrated games I've ever played.  This one uses 3D models rather than live footage, but the result is some beautiful 2D animation.

For my project, I'll be tracing over live footage of myself performing basic character actions in a video game, such as running, jumping, crawling, and idling.  I'll be posting my progress frequently in the next few weeks.  This is a new experiment for me, and will hopefully be a satisfying lesson to learn as an animator.