Anky
Anky is a short story of an Ankylosaurus defeating a Tyrannosaurus Rex invented by my son (5 years old at the time). I wanted to teach him about the steps that go in to making a stop motion animation. Something he likes to watch during his screen time, but has no idea about how it is done.
I got him to come up with a story and we made a storyboard. We then started looking for reference images of the dinosaurs and the background. I drew them and he traced, coloured and cut them out. We invented ways to make the sound effects and I recoded him doing them. Finally we put all the elements together and he assisted me in moving all the elements around and recording the frames.
For the T-Rex I decided to animate all the libs separately to have more flexibility in the motion. The Ankylosaurus only needed six frames in both directions so I drew each pose and then traced and coloured both sides of the cut-outs so that we were able to use them in both directions.
I used and iPad to capture the scene and Dragonframe to capture the frames. The rest was then imported in to After Effects where I build the animation with the sound effects. Finally I added some smoke coming out of the volcano.
