Exercise: metamorphosis

For this, I had to identify and create a number of shapes and then animate them morphing into each other. I decide to go for organic forms and draw directly using alcohol paper and alcohol markers. I wanted to make it a bit more cartoon-like as we were advised to do simple drawings of random objects in our environment. I decided to have a bit of fun with a series of red fruit and veg I had in the fridge (and seemingly continuing my red phase the last exercise!) and morph between a chilli, red pepper, apple, tomato and pomegranate. I did not have a balloon but I came up with that as a nice final object that cam naturally as an idea from the roundness of the pomegranate.

I first drew the keyframes I needed keeping them in the same square and space in each sheet:

Then I dew all the frames in-between to morph between each.

I used alcohol paper to achieve this as its slightly transparent and also great for alcohol markers so it was helpful to do the morphing with the previous drawing underneath and then putting the next keyframe drawing on top every now and then to gauge where the drawing needed to go.

Here is the full sequence of key frames and bits in-between!

The link to see the GIF on GIPHY is here. WordPress would not allow me to embed it. https://media.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExam5lejB6MXQwZG83N2RmNmY5aTk2YTExaGc0cHBuZXhzNTg1ODBqYyZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/xWIlkcqg3adVDsY7HY/giphy.gif

Reflections:

• I used canva to create this as it has a really easy to use interface and the images automatically centred themselves. I had measured as precisely as possible to place each image in the same square and place in each piece of paper and this worked well enough with maybe one or two drawings slightly moving but this is less noticeable given the fact they are morphing anyway.
• You can also animate each little frame so I played around with that and settled on making the final morph (or key frame) last a little longer in time and kind of pop, like it was the final part of the transformation before it moved on to the next object. The final balloon was more a wiggle as if it were blowing in the wind
• Drawing the frames in between was not as easier as I thought – using slightly transparent paper helped trace the position in the same place and helped gauge where to morph next. Sometimes I drew the next key frame outline as well as the previous drawing to keep myself between and so I didn’t create too much difference though this was not always that easier and of course in 5 frames there is a limit to that when the objects were quite different shapes.
• Keeping the red, dark red and white highlights was easy enough but morphing out the green from the apple to the pomegranate made me think that it would be harder if there were a lot more colours to use!