I had the idea for the Timeloop Wizard pretty quick. I’ve been wanting to dabble in animating for ages and just needed a deadline to force myself to do it. As for the Wiz himself, there was no doubt I’d animate some sort of fantasy malarky (I’ve been inspired by these shorts especially) and as soon as I thought about the looping nature of the video it just clicked.
I struggled with learning how to animate from scratch. The tutorials I found were really complicated and most assumed some base level of knowledge I just didn’t have. Finally I found Adobe’s tutorials for animating in Photoshop and ran with that even though the instructions were frustratingly vague. I ended up making the animation as simple as possible, building the wizard (Zyrtec, the Magnanimous) in a series of layers. His body didn’t need to move so that was all one layer with his head and hat. His moustache, eyes, and eyebrows all went on separate layers so I could move them independantly.
I recorded his voice in Audacity and threw it into the timeline and tried to sync up the bobbing of the moustache but it’s pretty awkward. The Timeline works much faster and more intuitively than the frame-by-frame animation but everything moves with this odd smoothness by default and I just didn’t have the time to work out how to fix it. The eyes were a weird challenge. I wanted them to grow wider when he was freaking out at the end but I had to stretch and squish them to get them to fit on his face.
The whole project was a ton of frustration, fun, and a huge learning experience. For a first attempt at character animation I’m pretty happy with the result. Once it was done, exporting it and using Eyejack was a breeze.