Walking Trash Fire
Feeling anxious?
Who wouldn't these days! I handled my anxiety by materializing it in the form of a trashcan on fire. Like a lot of my ideas, this one started in the form of a doodle on a post-it, and developed from there.
Making flames go frame-by-frame
Think it's hard to make flames? There's nothing to it! All it takes is a repeating sine wave to get things started.
Next is adding some base shapes of the fire that match the pattern of the wave. For this, I hand-animated both a candle flame shape, and also a more bubbly-shape to help give it a bit of a more organic feel.
After overlaying those shapes on top of each other, you can trace over both shapes, and that will get you 90% of the way there. The rest is just adding some color to and a bit of secondary animations, and you've got yourself fire, there pal!
Disclaimer: Always animate flames responsibly.
Next is animating a number of other assets.
Frame-by-frame
There are a ton of tools to help making animation easier, but sometimes, nothing beats the need of going traditional animation (even if it is in digital).
Final touches
Googly eyes, color refinement, a few compositing™ tricks, a little music, and our little guy is ready to take on the world.
He's so handsome.