We are now on the seventh week of our game project, which means we are making it closer to the end. Beta is due for Friday and our programmers are working day and night to have everything ready till then, unlike myself who have barley got anything to do this week. However, it is quite a convenience since I am starting to feel ill and is in need of some rest.
Anyway, last week I finished what I believe might be the final animation for this project, our nameless main characters death animation.
At first, I was expecting this to be the most difficult animation to animate, since I wanted the characters death to be very exaggerated, similar to old plays and movies, and I was not sure how to properly portray that with my level of skill. Luckily, while looking through some of the earlier animations of the main character, I stumbled upon a frame where he was posing as if he was about to slip and fall on his back. The frame gave me an idea for the animation, and thus It was on.
I used the frame that had given me the idea as a first key frame, the I drew out a few simple stick-figure key frames to capture the movement. As I get a skeleton done, I start defining the volumes, seeing to that everything is moving smoothly. As I get done with the characters shape, I move onto the hands. The hand were they only part of this animation that actually made itself an obstacle. It was the first time I had to animate these 1920s cartoon gloves, not forming a clenched fist, and I found out that keeping the fingers the same size and shape was far more difficult than I had anticipated. However, after taking some time off to figure out how to draw these hands easily and effectively, and seeing to that I had a 1:1 picture of the main characters glove close at hand while animating, I managed to finally get it right.
Eventually I moved on to finish the remaining features; the hat, mustache and the floppy penguin tail fin thing. The hat and mustache is not worth mentioning much, it was a matter of just drawing them at their appropriate positions. However, for the penguin tail I decided to do something extra.
In my previous animations of the main character (we really need a name for him), the penguin tail simply flopped around in the background without much interesting happening there. This time I tried to give the tail some interesting movement, making it follow through in a curved motion, imitating the the curve in the main characters leap backwards.
I think the penguin tail was what really breathed life into this animation, and it made me really happy to be able to finally put the tail to good use after having it just hang around for so long.
Urkenblogg 
Thank you for a well-structured and interesting blog post with nice grammar and good flow.
You’ve obviously put a lot of thinking into your death animation, and it really shows. I could have been a bit tricky doing the animation with the graphic style and the perspective that you have in your game but I think you did a great job. I agree with you on the part about the tail, it really gave a lot of life to it all the way it followed the character falling.
It was good that you talked about the different steps in your animating process, that you made a skeleton first and then the volumes. It is thing like that which would be good to know if I myself was to make an animation. And that you chose the sketchy picture where things had separate colours also made the way you’ve worked with it clear. Something I would have liked though is a picture of the finished animation as well it would be nice to see them side by side. Or maybe showing pictures of the different steps that you took when animating the character, making it easier for people without any knowledge about animation to understand and try it out themselves.
Good luck this last couple of weeks!