Blue Bird

A cartoon bird that I animated over video footage. The client was producing a series of videos with one scene a Disney Snow White parody which required a little blue bird to fly in. To give the bird a Disney-esque look, I used a hand drawn, frame by frame (or cel) animation technique which involves drawing an image for each frame of film.

 

Blue Bird

A cartoon bird that I animated over video footage. The client was producing a series of videos with one scene a Disney Snow White parody which required a little blue bird to fly in. To give the bird a Disney-esque look, I used a hand drawn, frame by frame (or cel) animation technique which involves drawing an image for each frame of film.  

The project started with designing two different bird characters for the guys at Twist and Shout Communications to choose from.

carton bird character design option 1
carton bird character design option 2

The scene was filmed and acted out with an imaginary bird, then I plotted key frames to plan the bird’s motion using Photoshop’s animation features and a Wacom drawing tablet.

Once the key frames were approved, I sketched out the animation of the bird with a pencil brush in Photoshop.

bird animation pencil tests

After the pencil tests were approved, I used ink brushes in Photoshop to colour the animation.

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