Gallop: The Making Of

yeah, the "Making of"...

i thought that many of you would think "how the hell did she do that???" about my gallop animation, so here's the solution to the mistery. XD
in fact, there isn't need for a lot of skill and talent in order to do something like this. just the right tools and some horse knowledge.

so you can understand this picture, you must know that each row represents a step in the process and each collumn is a different frame (photogram). they are in reverse order, which means that the correct order to view the frames is from right to left. and that is the order in which they are pilled up in photoshop, the left on top, the right on bottom.

> so, the first row (brown horses with red spots) are screenshots from this program (pivot stickfigure animator), which i used to create and animate the horse stickfigure. i've chosen to take the frames with those red spots, because they mark each joint of the horse. the creation and animation of the horse took me 1 hr.

> after placing each of the pivot-screenshots in it's layer on photoshop, i've underlined the shape of the body, neck and head, and i've drawn the bones, following the red dots.

> with the skeleton ready to go, i've put "meat" in it's bones, drawing the basic shape of the legs. this was the longest step in the whole process, and the most important one.

> then i've added the mane and improved the tail (or else, destroyed it, cuz it looks much worse now)

> lastly, coloured it. without any shadows or background, this was the easiest part! XD

overall, i've taken 3 hours for all the frames (not couting the modelation and animation with pivot), which makes an average of 30 minutes per frame.

so, basically, the part that needed more skils was the creation and animation of the stick-horse! for that, you need to know how to build a stick figure, how to make it look and move like a horse, and how to make the horse you've built gallop. after that, everything's easy! besides, you can find this (free) program all over the web, it's small and extremely useful!

can't remember what more to say, so...

time taken: 1 hr for creating and animating the sticktigure, plus 3 hours for the rest of the photoshop drawings
reference: absolutelly none. i've built and animated the horse without any reference, and i've done all the drawings also out of my own head.
tools: pivot stickfigure animator & mouse; photoshop elements & tablet.


wew... hope you like it! comments always welcome! ^ ^

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you can use this picture as reference or as lineart, as long as you ask my permission (wich will be certainly given), credit me and put a link to this picture in your work. thanks! =)