Dance collaboration

College year: 2, 1^st semester
Course: Traditional Animation II

A dance collaboration in my class. Ours has the best editing in the school’s history so far and the first to make loopable. (So you have no choice but to watch it twice! Muahaha! But no, please to do so considering it was made with looove.) XD Please forgive the poor quality, we all rushed through this last minute and the pencil test computers can be fickle. Two of our professors got to dance in there (one of them shown twice). XD We edited the arrangement of the song a bit to fit our roster.

If you’re the artist of part of this video and would like this taken down, I will.

Here is my character design: Dance character. And here is my portion by itself: Dance -wip.

Mine isn’t finished but the body is there. I tried adding all the clothes and face over the winter break and got as far as the simple jacket, but once I started the braided hair, it was too much time and I need to move on. Our curriculum is very packed so I’m glad that many of my classmates’ characters were also rushed.

It would have been smart to recycle drawings in repeating dance moves like most students did, but this was the most important class of the semester for me and the last 2D animation we will have before fully immersing in 3D, so I wanted to give it my all by having an actual dance choreography—my animation had zero recycled drawings, a total of ~90 drawings! *Collapse* I drew both the beginning (smoke bomb) and end transitions (shattering glass) before and after my part. (Kind of sad that my class didn’t do as many awesome transitions like last year’s and year before.) The transition from the woman to the chipmunk is wicked!

Somehow I immediately had the character design in mind, a dark skinned cool and trendy woman (short denim jacket with rolled sleeves at the elbows, short rolled up denim shorts; then cool factors such as the military hat, dance sneakers, and fingerless gloves) with a long braid who danced specializing her long legs. She is sexy but mature, embracing her feminism, but with a splash of tomboy due to her confidence and in case she ever needed to kick butt. XD I chose a female character because I feel it’s a plus not only to animate a person but with flair that females are so good at—character. The long braid and short denim jacket were for overlap which shows off more animation skill. Her design is indeed not caricatured and cartoony enough; I will work on making more of that type. For this project, it was mainly to get the animation down with a sexy feminine flair characteristic.

I spent days researching the type of dancing in my head but wasn’t so lucky. (I sure found a lot of amazing and different types of dances, though.) She needed a mature kind of dance (no camel toes or bum jiggling) that’s cool with confidence, holding onto the rim of her hat or grabbing her jacket for emphasis, with a sharp and precise spring in her step. I found the next best thing in K-pop dancing; the first part of my animation was referenced from Hyo Yeon’s (from the female band Girl’s Generation or SNSD) concert performance where she wore a jacket as well, then the spin into the crouch was referenced from the boy band Shinee, and the leap into a glass shattering stomp was from the opening theme of The Avatar: The Last Airbender.

I can only get better!

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Song: “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody (All We Got) feat. Q-Tip & GoonRock” by Fergie from the movie The Great Gatsby.
Done in pencil and Photoshop.
Completed in 2013 December 6.