Amanda Castro Band Cel Animation
Personal Work, May 2021
The Amanda Castro Band has such a cute little character that she uses as her mascot. I make a lot of music videos for the band and I wanted to do something fun and different with my animation skills.
So I took a jpeg of the artwork (created by the talented @zakeno) and recreated it in Photoshop. I wanted the entire thing to be cell animated by hand.
I started with the wings. I used my hand for shape reference.
Then I created a spacing chart by animating a ball in after effects at the speed I wanted it, then exporting a screenshot of the spacing. Animating wings was actually pretty hard to do. I think I started over at least 5 times.
Just when I thought nothing would be harder than the wings, I got to the hair. I found a great tutorial from DoKiDoKi Drawing on YouTube on how to properly animate wavy hair. It’s in Japanese but very useful! Just like with any animation, you start with the key “poses” then fill in the in-betweens.
What helped me comprehend how the hair flows was to focus on the bumps in the hair and making them move along a path in the direction I wanted it to go. (It’s all explained in the video)
Then I took all of sketched frames in Photoshop and imported it into Animate CC then traced over each frame and colored them in.
Lastly I animated the easier things like the eye blink and the slight movements of the unicorn’s legs.
And the end result is this fun little looping animation you see here.
Patrick Aranda created the fun little jingle.
Crazy how something that looks so simple takes so long to make! I don’t usually do too many fully hand drawn animations so I know my speed will be better with the next one.
