Development of my Turnaround

For this task we were required to produce a full 360° turnaround of the character we produced as a part of our previous Captain Character brief. As is the standard, the animation must be at 24 Frames-per second, with a duration of 4 seconds. Turnarounds are an important element of character design, particularly when realising a character in three dimensions. A turnaround has the sole purpose of illustrating to the animators the proportions of a character from any angle allowing them to be realised more accurately from multiple perspectives.

(An example of a character turnaround)

For my turnaround I used a combination of traditional and digital media. The four main keyframes were created using fineliner pen on Animation paper using a Lightbox. The Front, Back and Profile views of my character were created on Animation paper and then scanned in to be used as reference for the in-betweens which I produced digitally in Photoshop. By drawing the inbetween frames digitally this allows me to amend any mistakes made during the production and to perfect the timing of the turnaround, as I wanted to ensure that the motion of my character rotating was as smooth as possible and not unnatural or jerky. 

Front View

Profile View 1

Back View

Profile View 2

There were areas, during the production of my turnaround where I cut corners to speed up the animation process, and not always for the better and sometimes to the detriment of my turnaround. The second profile keyframe of my turnaround is a trace of the previous profile keyframe but flipped. This was to ensure the proportions remained consistent, but upon reflection this seems like a cheap shortcut and something I will not repeat in the future. Another area in which I think my turnaround can be improved is in the pattern on the clothing of my character. The stripes, while mostly consistent across all frames, tend to suffer from excessive line boil, but not in an aesthetically complimentary way, but in a way that makes the animation look clunky. Finally, upon completion of my turnaround, I noticed that during the last frame, the character's lips are missing, which while not obviously noticeable right away, is still nonetheless something I will have to go back and amend.

(Turnaround: Click to view)

In summary, my first attempt at a turnaround could use some improvement and is something I will probably come back to before the end of the module. I also plan on adding colour at some point as well as giving the linework more definition to give the image more dimension and depth, as as it stands now the linework is fairly weak and could use more work to make it stand out.