Why are there Whalers on the Moon?

This is why!


[Note:  the video window is extremely glitchy using Safari.  There are no issues using Mozilla Firefox]

This is my latest completed animation.  It is for an assignment called the Anijam, where every student is given the same drawing by the professor, and has to create an animation that both starts and ends with that drawing.  Included in this post are two "paths of action" which were used for the whale and earth animation.

First is the whale's path of action.

This path of action is very similar to one of a previous animation I did for my final in the first semester - the Fish Swim.  First I drew a path of where I wanted the whale to appear on the screen.  Then, using a floor grid on a separate sheet, I figured out the whale's "ground" position, so that I could determine the perspective of the path.  The three blue crosshairs on the bottom of the drawing show the whale's width at that point in the picture, and from there I could draw construction lines on each of the animation drawings to the ground position of the whale, to determine the size of a sphere which I used to judge the proportions of the whale.  The ground path, also gives me an idea of how much foreshortening to use on the whale.

The second "path of action" is that of the Earth

Now I realize this isn't exactly a path of action.  I use the term for lack of a better word because like a path of action, it lets me know what positions certain parts of the model will be in at specific times.  In this drawing, I broke the circle down into ellipses, using trigonometric calculations of 10 degree increments to determine the semi-minor axes (distance from the closest part of an ellipse to its centre, to its centre) of the ellipses.  For example, the calculation, sine of 10 degrees multiplied by the radius of the circle was used to find the semi-minor axis of the smallest ellipse, and sine of 80 degrees x the radius was used to find the semi-minor axis of the largest ellipse.