Beginning to animate

I started my animation by first drawing over the footage I had recorded, which I had imported into photoshop in a frame by frame format. This made it easier to draw a rough skeleton over the top of the figure to gain an understanding of the movement for the animation character. Having only the hand move made it easier to animate as I didn't have to worry about the rest of the body moving, this allowed me to draw the hand in slight detail as it moved within each frame.

To import the video as layers.

Looking at the movement stacked on top of each other allowed me to see the arc of the action,
not only did the wrist and elbow move but also the shoulder as it raises,
moves across and falls back down to her side.

After drawing all of the action I needed to add the detail of the character, as the character was male I needed to make his shoulders boarder than the figures. To solve this problem I used references from the comic of the character that I was drawing, Corinthian, which helped me to create broad shoulders in relation to his body.
I also needed to set the animation in a monotone approach as I would be adding colour through the use of the landscapes that would be moving through the whiteout of the lineart.

To make this sequence of images black and white, I used the wand and lasso tool to select the area and fill with the bucket tool however after I deselected the image, the edge was extremely pixelated. To solve this I used the history menu to undo the fill action and modified the selection by expanding the selection by 2 pixels, with a slight feather, this worked well as the pixelated edge had gone and the fill worked with the lineart.

I believe that the final animation works well with my initial storyboard idea as the character disappears, in which I can introduce the name of the title sequence, Sandman Overture. The detail added in the outline works well as it still captures the personality of the character even though no facial features can be seen.