Bringing the Beast to Life

To begin animating the Crocorilla, I decided that it would be best to study both gorilla and crocodilian movement.  I did this via the following videos:

Gorilla Reference 1

Gorilla Reference 2

Gorilla Reference 3

Gorilla Reference 4

Crocodile Reference


I found these very useful for getting a better idea as to how my creature would move, given that it has the arms of a gorilla and the legs of a crocodilian.

From this I decided to go with 3-4 animated actions: walking; running; chest-beating; attacking.

With the actions in mind, I could begin to do reference studies from the videos. I found this a very pleasing way to work, even if it did take a considerable amount of time having to stop and start videos and watch the same small sections over and over again.

Walking

Running

Chest-Beat

Attacking

I also decided to sketch out a quick set of storyboards, as I had the idea that I could combine the actions into one run-together animation, however the more I thought about it and studied the pros and cons, I realised it was not the best way forward and would instead continue with the showreel.

To animate the Crocorilla, I decided that the best way to do so would be to run passes, rather than go through each action, fully rendering each image before moving on to the next. This way, at least if I run out of time, everything will be up to the same speed.

So first off I began by using basic shapes for each of the Crocorilla's parts and moving them around using Flash:

I found this way of animating very useful, as it meant I could concentrate on the movement a lot better without worrying about the details.

I chose just to focus on the 3 animations, as I didn't feel I had left myself enough time to focus on 4 and would rather achieve 3 better ones than 4 rushed ones. Hence I chose walking, running and chest-beating.

So on top of the basic shapes for each frame, I drew the Crocorilla and changed the hue and saturation so that the blues became browns, achieving this look:

Here are the links to the animations done in this way:


Crocorilla Walk

Crocorilla Run

Crocorilla Chest-Beat


With the end looming near, I decided that the best way to proceed was to keep the animations the way they are, as I'm happy with them, and add a relatively simple background to stop the sparse emptyness. I went for a snowy mountainous region with bare trees as can be seen in the updated animations:


Crocorilla Walk

Crocorilla Run

Crocorilla Chest-Beat


With the animations complete, I could create a showreel in Adobe Premier and chose a suitable sound track to accompany it:


Black Sabbath - 'Zeitgeist'


Having never used Premier before, it was a bit trial and error to get things working, but it was a fairly intuitive programme so I managed a lot better than I thought I would.

Here is the final showreel ready for submission:


Showreel


Overall, I am pleased with the final outcome, though I do feel the animations are a bit short. I feel that the addition of the background and sountrack to the showreel really helps the character a lot.