Panda

I used the same pieced image of the Panda as I did for the Tiger to create the Panda. However I spoke with Jenny about how many pieces the image was in and we made it less pieces. After having all the pieces for the Tiger I found that I only animated a couple of the parts. This meant that all the time I took cutting the pieces then reforming them was void. To avoid this time consuming task, I thought more about which parts I would be moving. Like the Tiger the Panda wouldn't need all the parts to be moving. I decided I would animate the eyes, feet and head.

I decided that the eyes would be good to animate because they were the biggest and most important part of the Panda. They would convey the sadness of it as it had quite sad eyes. I wanted to draw attention to the eyes by animating them the same way I did with the Tigers Tale. 

Once again I used the base image of the Panda to build it in flash. However I realized that the Panda did not have a drop shadow on its parts. A drop shadow was important as it made our characters and assets seem less flat. As Jenny was busy making other assets and characters at the time I decided to just add the drop shadow to the parts myself. I used the image of the panda parts (above) and put it in photoshop. I then added a drop shadow based on the settings that Jenny had been using.

After adding the drop shadow I re-cut them into their individual pieces and then brought them back into flash. It was easy to fix them as I just put the new pieces on the old pieces, replacing them. This meant that whatever animation I had done up until that point was still usable.

I also realized that naming my layers easily identifiable things would help me in the long run. Prior to this I just left them at layer 1, layer 2 ect but this made moving parts harder as I would have to search for the right layer. I also found that the lock layer tool and the hide layer tool were very effective. I would lock the layer if it was not in use, meaning I couldn't move it by mistake. The hide layer tool was very effective when I was piecing together the animal. This was because I could hide layers like the head and put the eyes on and size them correctly. 

Another key habit I got into was having very organized, clearly communicated file names, particularly on dropbox. Our group had a shared dropbox account giving us easy access to each others files. I found that some members of the team would label files or folders very odd things that were unclear as to its/their contents. I did not want to have this problem so I made a folder named Animations and then each animation state for each character got its own folder. This meant that no frames would go missing or get confused and there would be no mix ups.