I think I’m getting better at this animation thing. This one is a bouncing english muffin (the face will be added later). It has one extra frame which helps slow it down some, plus I’m hoping the flopping hat will add a little to the effect. Comments and critiques would be greatly appreciated!

Based on all the great feedback people posted, I gave it another go. I left off the face and hat because right now I’m just focusing on the timing. Hopefully he looks more like he is hopping along on his own strength rather than just bouncing effortlessly.

Whaddya think?

I need some feedback from all you animators out there. I’m working with a client on some simple racing games to be animated with Flash. The first game involves breakfast food characters (donut, bagel, strudel, etc.) racing each other. This is a rough test animation of the bagel bouncing along. Because of the budget I have to keep it at about three basic poses at 12 frames per second. Whaddya’ll think? I’m not fishing for compliments, I really want to know. He seems to move kind of sluggish, not sure why. I’ve never had formal animation training so any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Oh, and that’s supposed to be a “dust trail” of cream cheese squirting out of him on impact. Not sure if it reads well, but it’s something the client requested.

Recently I was interviewed by the Character Design blog. I consider it an incredible honor to be included among so many very talented people, and I am very humbled. You can read the interview here. I put a lot of thought into answering the questions, so I hope I was able to give some advice or insight that will be helpful to someone.

I’ve been comissioned to design a vole character for an animated “Whack-a-Mole” type game. Problem is, voles are extremely cute, and who wants to whack a cute character? So I started playing around with abstracted shapes to hopefully give him a little more attitude. Not sure if it worked. This is my progression of sketches. Feel free to post a comment and let me know what you think, I’d appraciate it.
(Click for a larger image)