Jamie

Jamie was the most difficult to put together as there were so many different parts. She was also the hardest to animate because of all these parts. She has multiple states also which mean she will have the most movements. Below are pieces that I imported into flash, her hair, eye and part of her shirt.

We also decided to have two versions of the sleeve. The first version is part of the shirt and the second version can go on the top meaning I can move her arm with the appearance of moving the shirt sleeve also. This ended up proving very helpful.

Her first state is a run state. This is the most common state that Jamie will be in. Jenny and I spoke about weather or not we wanted Jamie to have knees. We decided against it, with the intention to animate the legs based off Dora the Explorer. She also does not have knees. I watched several Dora the Explorer games and video clips to see what their animators did to compensate for the lack of knees. 

The biggest thing I notices was that in Dora the Explorer whenever she ran or jumped her legs would move from the waist. If they needed to move up, like her body was compressing e.g. in a jump state the legs would move up into her body. I used the same principle for Jamie. Originally I also had her hands and feet apart, in a starfish like stance for when she jumped. However Jamie looked very strange when like this, I deiced that she would be better if her legs were together and her hands were stretched out in front of her showcasing the forward momentum.

For her running cycle I used the same way a human would run with the Dora principles for how her legs managed to move. In a human run cycle typically the head, moves forward, the body leans forward and from side to side. The arms and legs also move with the left arm behind the body when the left leg is in front of the body ect. Both legs are off the ground at the same time, this is when the body is at its highest and the arms and legs are at their fullest. These are the same things I applied to Jamie when she ran, except with a lesser flourish of movement so that she did not look weird. She also did not move from side to side as this was hard to accomplish in 2d.