Hello everyone! I decided to work on something a little different and create a short animation. I made a little water sprite fly around, and some other stuff. This project was put together in two weeks.

My goal with this animation was to make it smooth and have it have both a calming and a bubbly feeling to it.

In the beginning, there was nothing. I spent a few hours thinking of an idea, when inspiration hit. Something simple, a little water sprite, and just have it flit around on screen. So I began to storyboard:

Once I knew how I wanted the sprite to move and had an idea of what background I needed, I sketched out the assets I would need:

With storyboarding and sketches done, I moved to creating the vector assets needed for my animation. With the sketches done, this was simple.

Next, I began animating and created a short draft:  

I showed it to some of my peers, and got really good feedback about making the sprite stand out more against the rest of the water. Once I fixed that, I made the animation a bit smoother and showed my second draft to more peers:

The feedback I received was that the sprite and water were still too close in color, the left and right movement was too abrupt, the strokes on the lake should be rounded, and a suggestion to make the stars twinkle. 

I happily made those changes, and I found that they really helped make the animation so much better. As a final touch, I added some sound from Freesound.com. With all that done, I had my final animation.

I’m happy with how this short animation turned out, the movement and design of the character feels bubbly, and the sky and sound give it a calming vibe. The movement is smooth between transitions, and nothing feels too jarring.