You are here:

Inspirational Art 4u - Inspirational Artwork Pictures by the inspired artist Edward McNaught-Davis

Digital Animations by Edward McNaught-Davis

Military Sky Van Animation

This 2D Stop Motion digital animation shows a military sky van coming into land and then taxing along the runway, to allow an armoured jeep to exit, prior to taking off again. This animation demonstrates more than one moving component within the same sequence. Although this animated motion is rather farcical, you can make any animation to be quite realistic as demonstrated by the animated train with its coach.

Animated Train with Coach

This animation clip illustrates a transparent train reversing out of a tunnel to retrieve its coach. As the train couples with the coach you can clearly see the coach shunting back a little as you might expect. These small details make the animated sequence more realistic. Filters were used on the tunnel entrance to make the train look as though it was disappearing into the tunnel itself rather than behind or in front of it. It would be possible to append other train scenes to this one to make a much longer story board rather like the Dakota airplane animation below.

Animated Space Craft in Full Colour

This animated space craft sequence makes use of full colouring and simple detail such as the space craft’s door opening and closing plus the steps or ladder appearing and disappearing in a controlled manner. Also many components are all moving at the same time to add to the tongue-in-cheek realism. Each of the components started off as a digital line drawing and each was saved as a complete illustration in its own right. By applying 3D filter effects to the actual space craft or indeed anything else, you can make anything appear more solid in comparison to being flat rather like the military sky van above.

Dakota Airplane Animation with Paratroopers

A story board concept is used to make up this 2D animation. The sequence of events starts with paratroopers exiting the Dakota plane. Each soldier’s parachute opens after he is well clear of the flying plane and similarly each soldier lands in the same drop zone. They then find an armoured jeep and ride off to do battle with the enemy. Colour is introduced into this 2D Stop Motion with the special effects of the guns firing and the explosions. The special effects could be created more realistically, rather like the animated space craft, although this would make the file sizes much larger and possibly slower to run. When writing these animations for internet display, you have to consider many technical variables such as, “Will it run satisfactorily on everyone’s PC within their chosen browser?”.

CLICK ON ANY IMAGE BELOW TO SEE ITS ANIMATION IN THE SCREEN ABOVE

digital animations wales,digital animations lampeter,framed document animations screen surround image,

Digital Animations Introduction

The digital animations you will see on this page were conceived while I was living in Lampeter, Wales. I’m now living and working in the Llanon region. Instead of making these animations into a video format and thus storing them on a platform such as YouTube, I decided to keep them local to this site and so I have made them into digitised animated .gif files. Although the selection of these 2D Stop Motion digital animations are simple, they do show the scope of what can be achieved with a little creativity. All were constructed quite quickly with Serif’s DrawPlus X2 software. No analogue or digital camera was used as you might expect with traditional 2D Stop Frame animations. With the exception of the dog continual line drawing, I drew the major components of each animation first with a mouse on screen and either saved them off as .gif or .jpg file formats to keep file sizes to a minimum. The animated space craft was achieved by designing its coloured background first and then exporting it as a .gif file prior to making it into a static background. All the moving components were digitally illustrated and then set as overlays on top of the static background and these included the space craft, the spacemen and the space buggy.

digital animations wales,digital animations lampeter,dog in suit animations button image,

Continual Line Drawing Animation

This dog continual line drawing shows how each line was drawn by digital animated sequence. Hundreds of stop motion frames were used to build up the total motion sequences. Each line was drawn directly onto the PC screen with a mouse. The resultant file size is about five times larger than the military sky van animation below. The approximate file size of this continual line drawing is just under one megabyte. Larger versions of this dog wearing a suit cartoon can be made into a static portrait by setting the final line drawing as a Vector.