I wasn’t looking this animation up but I came across it while just surfing through some of the most popular choices on BBC iPlayer and thought I’d have a look at it.
Named the ‘Octonauts’, they’re a bunch of animals that live in an underwater ‘hub’ and do fun-filled adventures…. Yey!
“Explore! Rescue! Protect!” – Cheesey no?
Surprisingly the animations for the characters are quite useful for the purpose of a reference for my own character Peepa. I’ve been simply looking at how the character’s interact with one another as well as move around, with them having a similar style of appenditures. They’re obviously aimed at a similar age range and just have that animated effect that fits the imagery with how they move. The simplicity of the animations really work well with the actual design of the characters but they still convey enough emotion to know what’s going on. Nice movement.
Here’s a link to iPlayer to a few of the episodes,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/search?q=Octonauts
With the leg movement, as I have spoken to Mat about how they’re pretty much stumps, it may be difficult to think about how she’ll stand and move around. How will Peepa’s legs and ‘feet’ work?
Well I have made them in such a way more for aesthetic reasons and just because of the style I wanted to place her in, so I’ve been thinking more about characters that are created with pretty much ‘stumps’, and see how they animate them. One really good example of this that I had thought of is Invader Zim. Although this is only two-dimensional it still has to use a similar principle and looks at how the leg bends and body moves with it.
I’m be making Peepa move in a similar way that you see Gir move from Invader Zim, as he’s always on the move and quite springy you really get to see how his little legs move. I’ve also looked into how some games like Spiral Knights have animated their ‘stubby’ feet for their characters to move around. All of the still have the knee join and use that as move of an axis and just ignore the foot than anything else, it seems.
Here’s a link to a YouTube video I found of Gir, I wasn’t allowed to EMBED the actual video…
http://youtu.be/SSM59xfZZFM
Although this is about looking at the actual animation of the 3D model and some of the characteristics of Peepa, I found this cheeky image and although I don’t know who did it, I know it’s from a book similar to Street Art Sketchbook “Schwarz auf Weiss Volume II”. I’m not sure where the book is from but it has some incredible sketches inside it including this one, but why I’ve put it here is that it gave me an idea about the enviroment for Peepa. Even though she lives in an underground stlye house, why does it literally have to be underground?
I really like the steampunk and futuristic style of the image but always the unknown…. why, who, what, where and when?!
Just a little thought I didn’t want to put on it’s own…
Cluk Animations 