Turtle Boat

I wanted to make something with quite a dreamy vibe, that included a nice match cut between two pieces of animation. I was browsing some images and saw a row boat and thought how the motion was quite like how a turtle swims with it's front flippers.

I took some designs I sketched in Procreate and made them in black and white in Illustrator so I could use Tritone to adjust the colour palette later on in AE. I then animated the motion for both with a similar rhythm.

I made a large painting in Procreate (4K) so that I could move the camera around the main central region if I needed to (I knew I would want to be able to move the camera in and out, and possibly up and down a little).

I used a variety of brushes to give a lot of texture, and looked at some references of painted skies to add to the hand-crafted, painterly feel.

I drew over the boat frames in Flipaclip to work out the key poses for my little rower, then used those as a reference for shape layers in AE to animate individually. Again, I would have liked more time to refine but I enjoyed the overall result and was happy at what I achieved in the time.