Mutton - (2D) Creature Animation

Mutton - (2D) Creature Animation.

For this project we were tasked to animate a creature within an 11 second scene, our goal was to be able to bring this creature to life by using the varied techniques of animation. 

Creature Designs 

My initial intent for these designs was to have a sheep in wolf's clothing sort of motif as I thought it would be interesting to animate a herbivore to act like a carnivore, I  even ended up exploring ideas of making some sheep werewolf-like creature which would have had a transformation scene, however as this diverted from the main point of this project I ultimately ended up picking just a simple goat for the animation.  

The final creature designs I made were two goats, one normal dark grey goat named Kid, and another white goat named Billy with a goats skull on his head. Although I had intended to do just normal goats I decided to implement a small influence from one of my concept designs as  I didn't want the ideas to go to waste. It also served to display a narrative of how creepy goats can appear and how death comes to them easily on farms as we eat them as mutton.

Story Board 

Animatic

Rough Animation 

Colour Scheme

As shown in the animatic I wanted the sky to go from light to dark so that this would prompt Billy the white goat to turn his head and notice the sky change, then have the final reveal of Billy turning his head back with a skull to perhaps indicate a grim reaper type of role he now takes as the other goat Kid "dies". 

When searching for a colour scheme for the sky I chose to reference the game Dark Souls III cover with its yellow sky, the reason why chose to reference this game was because I had ended up using its death sound in the animation once the skull head is revealed. Going along with these game references I decided to also take influence from the Legend of Zelda series of games, Tears of the Kingdom, with its blood moon red being used for when the skull head is shown.

Final Animation

Shaded still frames: