I chose a flamingo trying to keep it as simple as possible. Although I thought I'd selected quite an easy animal, when animating a 2D object it can prove quite difficult - we first had to make sure we'd keep the layer options and draw out each body part in separate layers, so we could easily animate each object without having to go through the process of destructing a flat image; I named them to make it easier on me to know which one I was animating. The process of importing the image was easier than I'd expected, we just had to select the option to retain the layer style.
I came up with many different obstacles when trying to animate my animal. Firstly, when moving the legs in the slightest way, it would show the gap where I'd tried to cut out the leg quickly, meaning that even the slightest movement exposed a gap in the leg of the animal, so the leg would have to be animated either very quickly or to not much of a big degree. The second thing was making the animal look realistic in its movement, depending on which animal would depend on how it would look when moving, so I had to research this in hindsight to make sure I could move the legs without it looking too stiff. This was one of the harder challenges for me, and although it's not perfect, I tried to make the animal look its best without revealing any gaps or errors I'd done.
Overall, I was really pleased with how my character came out, although really not perfect, it was nice to get to grips with animating different sections of the same composition, and bringing to life a character which I could use in later projects throughout my course.
