Lead, Brass, and Keyframes
By Geoffrey Marvin
Introduction
The challenge here was to make a looping, 30 second animation. I was pretty free to do whatever I want. My brainstorming process involved 2 criteria. I wanted to make something that would look cool in slow motion, and I wanted to make something with lots of individual moving parts. A pistol fits that bill perfectly. It looks really cool in slow motion and has lots of complex stages and steps that can only be seen when slowed down. This was my first time creating an animation, so I was a bit nervous.
Drawing the Pistol
I wanted to base my design off a popular pistol to make sure I would be easily identified. Since Glocks are often found on T.V., in movies, and in video games, I figured modeling my design after one would be a good idea. I obviously didn’t want to infringe on any copyright, so I made my own adjustment and changes to make it more original.
Rigging and Animatic
The next step involved importing the vectors I made in Adobe Illustrator into After Effects. I made each asset its own layer so that I could work with things more easily. I started by getting the basic animation down. The trigger pulls. The hammer cocks. The hammer hits. The bullet leaves. And the gun experiences backward force (recoil) and the slide- well… slides. I used a Youtube video from “The Oregonian” for reference.
Fine-tuning
Next, I tried to get some input from some other artists on what I could improve. The two biggest suggestions were to simplify the hammer cocking animation and add some motion blur. I applied those critiques and added a few of my own along the way.
Snags
I liked the animation. But it still didn’t look quite right. I had to go back into my compositions and adjust a few major things. I wanted to up the framerate to 60 frames per second to make it look even smoother. The smoke needed to react to the movement, so puppet pins were added. The recoil needed more that just backward motion, so I added some more vertical movement. Lastly, I made the tip of the barrel fan out as the bullet fired. This gave a little more fun, cartoony look to it.
Conclusion
I’m very happy with my final animation. It strikes a good balance of being realistic and cartoony at the same time. It loops well. I was able to have it fire at regular speed for three shots, then fire a fourth slow motion shot without motion blur so that you can clearly see all the details.
