For my final project I'm animating the story of my dog Pickles learning how to swim for the first time, by being jealous and insane. I started with some gestural sketches to get an idea of how stylized I wanted the character to be. Then I cleaned up some of the line work to simplify the characters a bit, a played around with different poses and expressions.

I then did a test animation of Pickles running to see if animating a quadriped would prove to be more difficult than I could handle. I used video footage for the test run.

After showing my professor the run she recommended animation a movement without the use of video footage before proceeding, so I animated the test jump without a video. We both agreed that the animation I did without a reference had more character, so I decided that I wouldn't animated directly from video for this project. I still plan to use video footage, but I only when my action is from a different angle. This way it'll force me to understand the movement rather than just copy the form.