The fully coloured animation for the Keith Haring mural...

 I had totally forgotten how laborious and time-consuming 2D animation can be...my god, but this is equally balanced by the joy felt in watching your animated figures spring to life when you're finished!

Here is the finished animation...

This was the first piece of animation I had created in Procreate as well as being the first animation I've made in about a decade and the choice of software brought its own challenges, for example, when using the animation mode in Procreate each layer becomes a frame so everything needs to be redrawn or coloured each time especially when at the clean up stage. Now there probably is a way to do this more efficiently by copying and pasting etc but considering this was my first time I was just figuring it out as I went. So the way I got round this when it came to cleaning up the first draft was to use the final frame of the sequence which had all the characters in place and work backwards from there. So I cleaned up the final frame and then duplicated it several times and laid it over the rough animation (working one frame at a time) erasing the characters as they changed position while leaving the ones that had finished moving in place. Example shown below...

Above you can see the final frame (drawn in orange) laid over the rough animation, all characters except the one top middle have finished moving so I could use the same outline to keep the lines steady. The grey figure needed to be redrawn so I erased the orange outline as shown below...

Another thing I had to take into consideration was the use of a coloured background, again I didn't want to have to colour the background in every frame so I decided to again use the final frame as a layout and guide to create the background. This process was described in my last post. I then exported this separately as a PSD (my lecturer Kieran had warned me to not save a compressed file such as a JPEG, if I was planning to import it into another program) and also exported the animation as a PNG sequence and imported both into After Effects to combine and export a final mp4 file.

Once I had finished the clean up stage, I realised that I would have to individually colour each character on each frame for it to show up on the background because the animation was going to be exported as PNG's (a file with no background). Below is an example of the first frame uncoloured with the background exported from After Effects...

Below is an example of how the animation looked once each character had been filled with white...

The next stage was to colour the shapes on each character. The following is a coloured still of the final frame...

This was a pain staking process and took a lot longer than I anticipated but I'm happy with the result, next I'm going to look at the timing (maybe try it on 2's) and play around with adding a glow to the background in After Effects.