Sarah Lynne Reulfishwife pencil test
Oh my, I am behind again on posting. This animation was for an assignment two weeks ago – we had to demonstrate a “stagger” animation, defined as kind of a shaking motion when someone is under stress (pulling/pushing/lifting something heavy), or if they’re shivering from cold or quivering from anger. The best way to animate this is to draw a series of frames with a nice, smooth arc of action, and then shuffle up the drawings.
I had fun designing this fishwife attempting to lift a huge fish. I filmed myself acting out the motion, pretending a pillow was the fish… I had originally planned for this to be about 15 seconds longer, but once I started plotting out the action on an exposure sheet (aka xsheet) I realized how ridiculous that was. It’s a big shift to start thinking in terms of seconds – as it is this film’s about 9 seconds long and it probably took me at around 8 hours to do from character design to final version.
You’ll notice that her features kind of disappear in the middle… the assignment was to get the overall motion down so I didn’t have time for the details.
Here are some of the initial character design sketches:
Sarah Lynne Reul 