For this relatively smaller class project we were issued to choose a specific scene from that of our chosen media product by an early practitioner who we enjoy the work of, in my case for example, I explored a short scene from the film ‘The Thief and the Cobbler’ involving the titular thief being beaten on by an old woman. 

I primarily utilized the use of a graphics tablet and a copy of Photoshop 2020, to begin however I used pencil and paper to help create somewhat of a crude storyboard to help plan its key frames, frame count, as well as where smears, and in-betweens would be required.

My first steps to transcribing the chosen scene was to create these sketches replicating the scene I wanted. Not much planning was needed as I needed this to be quick and somewhat crude for the sake of time for the project, and  start with every frame that begins and ends in a significant movement, and for this I watched the source scene over a few times just so I could catch each key frame that would have been in the film's production.

This first initial key frame shows the thief's first movements, I made the characters as simply drawn as possible was key, as to make the process of the project as streamlined as possible with no setbacks of adding detail which would take up time needed to finish the animation for the next phase of the project. Continuing to draw over my Sketches, the next Key frames went as followed:

When played in sequence, it allowed my to identify if it flowed by itself as a storyboard and where to next place the in-betweens. My next steps where to repeat the key frames of which that repeat themselves, at this point, this primarily applies to these two key frames in an up and down motion, creating approximately 14 additional key frames for a movement which repeats itself seven times like in the movie

Additionally, with a lot of these key frames, I had to experiment with and slightly change the pencil work I had created previously so it felt a lot more consistent in terms of scale and shape consistency, so I used only one shape for the old woman, and moved the arm underneath using the selection tool, putting it in a new layer, thus, giving me a new frame giving me a much easier time, rather than drawing the frames identically by hand.

After those key frames had been laid out I then went forward with the zoomed out perspective shot, the background of which in the source material is excruciatingly detailed, so rather than leaving it blank, I added the wall in the scene to better grasp the sense of perspective the film was achieving. The characters in this frame was flipped to get the other key frame, saving more time overall.

With the smear of the thief on the floor, and the preceding frame of lifting him up  I needed a way to connect them both without too much trouble, so I decided to use two smears in one shot, with two different frames, giving the effect that he's being lifted up quickly. These immediate frames happen with no delay in the timeline, so i was glad the illusion of its movement came across successfully.

To give an additional effect to the thief's head when being lifted up, is that I selected and rotated it to where it connects to his neck again, giving a sense of momentum.

This also applies to when his head is being slammed down by rotating it clockwise. I felt also a puff of smoke was also appropriate for authenticity to the scene. Another thing to add was with the up and down motion, whilst copy and pasting seven times in sequence, I also duplicated the eye smear frame from the previous motion by rotating it horizontally as to save me time and time drawing another one, and worked just as well.

For this shot with a much more zoomed-out perspective, I used the same “eye smear as the previous ones, but this time, duplicated in its own layer to be smaller for this scene, I repeated this motion by flipping the character 7 times.

My next port of call was to then add squashes for each impact the the thief has with the ground, and to avoid re-drawing any frames again, I selected the thief and squashed him only slightly using shift + drag, this applied also to the much more zoomed out scene the same effect was applied to a much smaller degree, but granted the same effect.

During the rendering phase of my animation, it appeared to come out too fast, to remedy this, I duplicated every frame that wasn't a smear frame, which slowed down the video to be animated in twos at a much more comfortable speed.  

To reflect, and to compare to the original source material, I feel the visual style and movement of my rendition came across a lot more stylized, I feel this was to be expected as Williams most likely produced this scene within months of work. Secondly, for the movement, utilized mostly smear frames, while Williams animated his work all in ones with completely fluid motion with much more visual detail, once again due to the time i had to produce this piece compared to Williams. I found that this being one of my first animated pieces, that animating can be extremely fun as a process now that I'm a little more accustomed to it, which I feel I definitely will for future projects.