My first piece of freelance animation work! It’s been one hell of a ride. Looking for a freelance animator and motion designer? Drop me a message today!
The Harleys are out in force with this one. We received this sweet illustration from Roger Wade for a bit of a passion project. Tasked with turning it into a rockin’ bit of motion design, I sat down to animate what would be my first piece of freelance work - look where we are now!
The piece is split into a few separate layers: the bike + rider, the ground and the sky. Let’s start with the focal point: the goggled greaser and his Harley. This layer has two sections: the light and handlebars (hand ‘n’ all) in front, and the man behind. There are some basic rotation and position keyframes on the bike with some subtle wiggle expression work to make the movement more natural. There are also some puppet pins on the biker’s arms and legs which also use some wiggle to add to the overall movement. His head’s also got a bit of a wobble on.
Moving on to the ground, I cut up some animated background clips and had them all face towards one single point on the horizon line; this gave the illusion of movement showing the biker “moving forward”.
And finally, on to the sky. We’ve got some super smooth turbulence on the clouds to give them some subtle movement. The skyline also slightly moves and scales towards the centre of the horizon line, again adding to the faux-movement of the biker.
Of course, as you can see from the cut off wheel arch, this piece never got past the WIP stage, but I still really like the style of it, and I learnt a lot of techniques in a short space of time while working on it!
// Studio: Grizzle Animation Studio// Animation: Tom Paddon, Tom Carpenter, Roger Wade// Client: Oi Oi Loco Films