Get That Hamburger! (Character Story Animation)

This is my Character Story Animation. I know this isn't the greatest animation ever; definitely not my best work. I apologize for the large black border around it; I wasn't sure how to fix that. Before watching this please read what I'm about to say: The story line of this animation is that the main character (the one with the mustache) sees a sign that says MacDonalds (McDonalds spoof) only has one burger left and he just has to have it. Little does he know that there is another character that acts as his rivalry who also wants the burger (he's wearing the "I'm With Stupid" shirt). They race to MacDonalds knowing only one of them will get the burger. That is all I can give away, you'll have to watch the animation in order to find out who gets it. The reason this animation is extremely short and simple is because I put this off for wayyyy too long. After procrastinating to the max, time became an issue and I only had a few days to finish the animation, get it rendered and then upload it to blogger; I was obviously in a rush to get it done. I take full responsibility for it, that was bad on my part and that's what I'm definitely going to improve on and one of the things I'm going to draw from this project in order to enhance my next project.

When I was making this project, I wanted to make an animation that told a story and also had a beginning middle and end. During the early stages of this project, I was thinking about what story I wanted to tell and what the characters should look like; I knew I wanted the characters to look funny, so that's what I did; that explains why they look the way they do. After I came up with a general idea of the story line, I began storyboarding it. Storyboarding is basically just drawing out different scenes so when it comes time to make the actual animation, you have a good idea of what you need to do and what needs to happen in the animation itself. Here is what my storyboard looked like:

There are some scenes in my storyboard that I never added to the animation; there were three scenes that I never added and they are the two scenes where it zooms in on my main character's face and the scene where he tosses his rivalry like a sack of potatoes. I never added those scenes because of confusion and time constraints. The arrows in my storyboard represent movement, or where I wanted the character to move/walk to. While I'm talking about the storyboard, I apologize for the bad art, I'm no artist and won't act like I am. The art is bad and I know it is, so bare with me.

After getting the animation storyboarded, I finally started animating it. One of the things I learned while animating this project was how to make different parts of the character's body extremely large. I know it's simple to do but I had never thought about doing it before and experimented with while animating. If you've already watched the animation, you'll know I never actually used this because when I first learned it, I thought it would be a way to give the viewer the illusion that I zoomed in, but when I tried it... Let's just say it looked better in my head.

Looking back on this project, there are a lot of things I would change. One of those things would be the absolutely awful walk cycle I had. I would definitely go back and try to improve that. The other thing I would do differently is make the animation longer and add the scenes that were in the storyboard. The only things I would keep the same are the backgrounds and the way the characters look; I think it adds a certain uniqueness to the animation.

Overall, this animation was pretty bad, terrible I might add. There is a lot of stuff that could have been done better or needs fixing. Given the amount of time I had to work on this, the terribleness of this animation is inexcusable and I take full responsibility; I'm definitely going to do better next time and won't procrastinate.