My Own Drawn Animation

My Dragon Animated

The Drawing

My character is a bipedal dragon with large wings, horns, and spines. I designed it like this to show my own spin on the classic dragon. I've always imagined dragons with two arms and two legs, large curved horns adorning the top of its head, and bat-like wings enabling it to fly.   

The Keyframes

There were a few issues of my character, as I forgot to close off shapes when I first uploaded my drawing, so getting each body part to different layers in Photoshop took a while. I also drew my character on the side, so I had to manually go back into Photoshop and use the rotate tool to shift the images over to the right side up. With Keyframes, the only issue that occurred to me on After Effects was the timing for when my character moved forward. So, by widening my workspace to show frame by frame, I shifted my character across the screen and paused it when the character's legs weren't moving.
Using a variety of different methods, including the Puppet pin tool, Move tool, and Rotation tool, I was able to have my character flap his wings, move his arms, have him walk, and have him nod his head. Pausing the animation every few frames, I copied and pasted repetitive motions for the legs to move naturally, and having them pause if one leg was already moving. The arms, I had moving up and down, using a combination of the Rotation tool and Move tool. I again copied and pasted the keyframes to have the arms move up and down. I had each step take about 15 frames with a couple frames break to show that the character is naturally walking.

The Actual Animation

Three things I learned to have my character walk is that you can copy and past keyframes so you don't have to do every single frame by hand, that you can rotate and move different parts of a character's body at the same time, and that you can resize your animation by making a new composition in After Effects.

An issue that I had making my character walk was to correctly time the keyframes and the actual movement to a reasonably believable way. I had to stop and pause the animation as soon as the foot was first moving up and out to walk and whenever the foot began to touch the ground once again, but after a few trial and error tests, I had done it well.

If I could redo it, I would change my walk to a more natural looking walk. Like the character is real enough to actually walk like a normal person instead of simply moving his legs up and down repetitively.

Even though I would change some of the techniques I used in my animation next time I try this, I am very proud of my animation and how far I've come from last year as an Animator. I'm glad I finally accomplished bringing something I drew and created by myself to bring it to life.