For my poster, I decided on a theme of comedy. I knew I wanted something funny, but I had to boil that down to something more concrete. Relaxing after my first week of school, I scrolled the TV channels until I stumbled upon TBS playing Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bob halfway over. I had my idea.
I wanted to try animation because I’d never done that before. Originally I was going to use Procreate but realized trying to lip-sync the dialogue of the scene I chose would be really hard and time consuming, something to try later, after learning some basics of animation. I knew I couldn’t do something too intricate so I ultimately decided on a simple 8-bit animation style sprite. After watching a few Youtube tutorials, I felt good enough to begin the design process.
Drawing the idea for the character sprite was the first thing. My favorite part of Talladega Nights was Cal Naughton Jr. played by John C. Reilly. I chose a scene where Ricky returns to find that Cal has completely replaced him in his families hierarchy, including tapping his face over Ricky’s in a family portrait. After the base drawing was done, I imported that into photoshop and put all the different features on separate layers. After all the pixel art had been made, I made 11 frames, and narrowed down my scene of dialogue to about 2 seconds. Made 11 frames of .2 seconds that would loop forever. Then went into every other frame to animate the individual frame details: hair bouncing, eyebrows moving, shoulders going up and down. I wanted that sort of idle animation you’d see in a fighting game when you’re selecting a character (obviously just not very detailed)
I did a test of the animation for something else, a pigeon cooing, just to see how photoshop animation worked with EyeJack and I had quite a bit of trouble with exporting as a gif and getting it to work properly. Luckily, when I did the Talladega animation everything seemed to work and export out really easily. This was a really fun project and I think it’s something I’d really like to work with and experiment on more in the future.