Blob Adventures – Part 1

After watching a Facebook live about animation, I got really inspired, so I wanted to make my own animation video. In the video, the man demonstrating created a blob character and set it in a forest. Now, I know it’s not cool to steal ideas but since I really liked the character and the forest idea, I decided to do the same.

One thing I remembered from my first time creating animation, was that the background wasn’t one whole shape – all the shapes were separate. For example, every time I went to move my character, sometimes I would accidently select a flower, and I would end up having to move that with my character. This makes the animation look messy, so I wanted to make sure that the same thing didn’t happen again. In order to achieve a fixed background, I created my background in PowerPoint beforehand and took a screenshot of it. Then I used that image as my background.

Once my background was set, I began making my character. I didn’t want my character to have just one expression, so I made different shaped mouths and saved them onto their own slide. If I needed my character to have a different expression, I was able to just copy and paste it onto its face whenever needed.

Then I began screenshotting. I made sure to move my character a small amount. I didn’t want my animation to come out jerky. I feel like the last time I did animation, I was impatient and moved my character too much. The finished result was not smooth at all and that defeats the point of animation - it’s meant to look like a regular video. I really stressed over the amount I was moving my character and how often I made him blink and so on. It was all so vital to make it look smooth. When I came up with the idea of making my character start a fire, I wanted to make it to look like he was throwing the sticks. To do this I moved the sticks around between screenshots, so they didn’t look completely perfect while gliding through the air.

When I started piecing the images together, I made sure to make them very short to stop the video from looking like it was stopping and starting. When my character was walking, I made them a bit longer as I didn’t want it to walk too quickly.

I made three separate clips that I then planned to piece together into one video, so that my editing software wouldn’t become slow. After adding fade transitions between each clip, at the start of the video and at the end, my video was finished.

In terms of the finished product and the things I would like to improve on, the tent throwing scene is one of them. It came out looking totally unrealistic and jerky. I really don’t like it. I think I definitely should have been more creative with that scene, as there are many different ways I could have made the tent appear. The tent itself doesn’t even really look like a tent – I know for a fact I should have given it more detail.

Watch the video here:

I made an updated version that includes sound: