Creating and animating digital characters can be a pretty fiddly and involved process, and there are a ton of different ways to do it. For quickly and easily animating 2D characters, by a very long way, the best tool I have discovered is After Effects' puppet tool. It allows you to take a single flat image of a character, and manipulate it to animate in incredibly natural looking ways with a minimum amount of fiddliness.
In November 2013 Exploring Senses artist Louis d'Aboville created an interactive installation for Brighton Council's Shine on London Road project. The puppet tool was used extensively to create over 70 animations from photographs of toy hacks.
Project video :
Toy Hacking from Jeb Hardwick on Vimeo.
Needless to say after this I was reasonably familiar with this tool! Exploring Senses have used this for new activities a few times during this R&D period.
The first was in April, when we did a workshop at Lighthouse as part of the SprungDigi project, (ES blog post here) The project involved working with learning disabled creatives to create toy hacks, learn how to animate them, and put them in a bespoke version of the software used for the Shine On London Road project.
The second time we used it was in the final workshop for our ICT Art connect commission. #LINK# It was used to quickly animate on the spot toys that were being made in the workshop, and display them throughout the workshop as part of Brighton Urban Artfest, an event for Brighton Fringe festival.
It was also used to create animations for the Sensory Jumblies project #LINK#
IdentiToy
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