My part in the project was creating the pixel art and animations / films in which the lions appear. The first step was creating the pixel art. I did this using Photoshop, following an image of a lion for inspiration and reference. I initially created a larger lion, but realised animating it would be a bit too complex for myself who has never done any animation before, and creating the original image took a long time on its own. Here is an image of the original lion before I stopped:
As you can tell I did not finish before moving onto the simpler version.
The pixel art which will be used in the project started out like this:
For each lion version that I created I made five leg animations, which I later trimmed down to three so the lion would appear more streamlined.
I then created six different lions for the genre of music which the lion would represent, each initially with the five leg animations, then trimmed them down to three.
60's Lion - Tie Dye Rainbow Shirt
Country Lion - Cowboy Hat
Jazz Lion - Sunglasses
Opera Lion - Viking Helmet
Rock Lion - Leather Jacket with Studs, and Piercings
Trance Lion - Glowsticks and Face Paint
I re-sized each image a few times to get them looking right without distorting the pixels.
The next step, after the pixel art and animations were created was to use Flash to animate them. For this, I decided to have the lion enter the screen on the left then dissapear to the right, then appear on the right and disappear on the left. You can see this in the video below:
