Brown Recluse on the Big Screen
Well, my baby came to life.
The black widow woman, the Brown Recluse, I created to be a main character of my serial killer cartoon is up and walking. She’s ready to terrorize the town now.
Just kidding.
This wasn’t exactly a “problem” that needed solving, but rather a personal project that I wanted to bring to life. The one problem associated was that a lot of cartoonists are typically men, and a lot of main characters are also men. I consider that a problem as my childhood dream was to be a professional cartoonist, and representation is important.
My project was to create a character I had drawn up four years ago as part of a cartoon about serial killers. The premise of the cartoon is that in “Anytown USA” one block of residents is all serial killers. The Brown Recluse was to be one of the main characters of the cartoon show.
I used my old hand drawings, Photoshop, and Adobe Character Animator to create a moving cartoon of her.
So, first things first. I had to import my drawings of my love into Photoshop to finish them up and fill them in with color and detail. I took photos of my old pencil drawings of her, and uploaded them to Photoshop. I then filled in color and detail and broke apart her body parts so that they could all be separate layers. The separation of body parts allows them to be rigged individually to move in Character Animator.
Now, this was great at first, but she needed to have a more static front view in order to be rigged properly in Adobe Character Animator. In order to walk she also needed two profile views, one left and one right.
This is a short video of how her walk started, and it looks like she is doing the running man.
After some rigging and adjustments to her walk, she was walking better. I even added a scene background:
The biggest challenges were first getting all of her body parts correct in Photoshop, which was time consuming as I had to redraw some of her in Photoshop itself. The next biggest challenge was getting her body parts “rigged” correctly in Character Animator. Everything she does hinges on the rigging. I had to watch a bunch of tutorials to get the rigging correct for her facial features and body parts. I kept her movements very simple for the sake of time. She can move her eyebrows, head from side to side, blink her eyes, smile, and walk.
For me, this is part of a larger project. I would like to add more characters for her to interact with after giving her mouth the ability to say different words and have that translate.
Eventually I would like to 3D print a model of her head, which I was hoping to get to this time.
From going to only paper and pen sketch drawings of her to seeing her be able to move and smile, I would say my biggest takeaway is that animation is hard when it’s on screen. Newspaper cartoons are worlds away from screen animations. There are so many intricate details of an animation to consider, which I learned from all of the rigging options on Character Animator.
Without further ado, here a narrated scene of the Brown Recluse!
