Poacher

Jenny finished making the poacher first as Lucas said that was the most important one since it had the most AI needed. I asked Jenny to give me the files that needed to be animated in parts, this meant I had complete freedom when it came to animating them. I would put the file into photoshop and cut it into its individual parts then import them into flash. From there I would rebuild the poacher using the parts in flash on different layers meaning I could animate them separately from one another. 

After struggling to rebuild the poacher I realised I needed a base image. I asked Jenny for a .png of the poacher with all his parts assembled. This became the foundation for a pipeline for us. Jenny would build the character, seperate it into parts and send it to me with a png image of the character assembled. I would cut it out and then lay them over the png and then hide that layer meaning the character looked how it was supposed to but now I was able to animate it. 

The image above are pixelated because I enlarged them from a smaller file for the purposes of blogging. The three images are frames from three states of poacher animation. The first is a shot of the poacher running along, this occurs when Jamie gets a certain distance from the poacher, he is still visible on screen so he picks up his bush and runs to a different platform where re resumes shooting. In this animation, I animated his legs, eyebrows and mustache. This gave him a creepy and personalized look for when he ran. I made him look like he was tip toeing, similar to how villains in interactive shows for children move.

His second state of animation was when he stops/starts shooting. This occurs before and after his run state. In this state he puts his gun away and pushes his feet down (the animation is reversed for when he   sits after running). The gun, feet, hat and bush were animated in this state as it made sense the bush would move if he was rustling with his gun. His feet needed to move for obvious reasons but I decided to move his hat instead of eyebrows or mustache to add a point of difference in this state than the others.

The third state of animation is when the poacher is shooting at Jamie. In this animation the biggest part was the movement of the gun. I had a the whole body of the poacher draw backwards with the force of the gun when it was fired. This was shown by the gun barrel also moving backwards. The eyebrows and mustache of the poacher were also animated to give him an expression of surprise, which continues the theme of interactive villain in children's shows.