Analogue Gif - Baseball

This is probably my favourite of my outcomes as I think it has the strongest and funniest idea behind it. Early in my character designs I thought of this distressed character and I've repeatedly kept turning back through my sketchbook to look at him, and I chose to take him out and use him because I feel he works so much better as a moving image than a still sketch. 

I actually enjoyed drawing out the frames for this character as it felt very playful, as I was able to warp and shift him however I wanted using tracing paper and the lightbox. This gif in particular has highlighted to me the importance of precision and focus when animating, as consistency between frames is the most important part of the moving image. At first I forgot a few shoelaces or stitches and the animation as a whole looked choppy and strange, so I went back in and added everything to make sure each image was the exact same but with differently aligned lips, and I feel that it shows in my final animation.

I'm really happy with my final animation, as it is literally my first ever attempt at creating a moving illustration. I cleaned the white areas up on photoshop to get rid of unnecessary pencil marks etc but I think the mismatched pencil lines and felt colours work well to convey a sense of rapid movement. To improve it I would spend some time creating a background and movement lines to help suggest that sense of flight and inherent dread the character is feeling. I'm also just sort of amazed that I didn't cock up the teeth on any of the frames. In the future I want to be more careful with the quality and thickness of line, because some of the pencil lines are inconsistent in their density and it can be distracting. I enjoyed animating this way as its a method that allows you to review as you go along through the various traced panels, so in future animation tasks I'll probably go for the analogue method and try to improve at it, as I have enjoyed it.