Dragonfly Animation

Originally I was going to do all my dragonfly animation on after effects but when looking at the dynamics and the different angles the dragonflies's body needed it seemed more problematic to do the movement on after effects than just doing it by hand.  All my tests of the dragonfly for my feasibility study were of it just going in a straight direction.  But there were some scenes where that wasn't the case, the dragonfly was changing direction and therefore different body angles were needed.  At the end I hand drew 10 scenes with the dragonfly only 3 require after effects.

I haven't done the wings like my test animation either, I simply hand drew them and smugged the pencil to give it a motion blur. In my line tests it worked very well.  The wings are also animated on a separate layer from the body as I am adding a colour overall effect to them so that they have the same colour as the light, to show they are from the same world, and it is much more visually interesting than just black wings. The only time the wings need detail is when the dragonfly is close up and not in flight.



Along with Alex animating the dragonfly in Scene5 shot1, which I was very pleased with, he is also cleaning up and colouring most of the dragonfly scenes.  He and Deb have been my most loyal and hard working helpers on the project and have come back with the best results.