Gravity Falls Backgrounds

I've been watching a lot of Gravity Falls throughout the holidays. I absolutely love this show, it's a fun and atmospheric show, that's well-written and has a clever narrative; as a kid's show it's not patronising, is a good introduction to a lot of mature plot elements and complex characterisation. On top of everything else, the animation is fantastic. The backgrounds in particular I love, they are just so beautifully drawn and add a lot to the mysterious atmosphere.

This image actually works both as a beautiful drawing and as a chilling background. It works so well with the tone they were trying to create, for what goes on deep in the woods. 

This background is used to establish location quite a lot. The trees in the background appear as anonymous as ever, and the way they fade, the further into the background they go, creates a sense of isolation, the feeling of being lost in the middle of nowhere, and that the further into the woods they go the more mysteries they will find. And on a side-note, I love the little joke with the sign "Mystery Shack" spelling out "Mystery Hack" when the "S" falls off.

Flash Induction

I was learning how to use Adobe Flash today... Well, I say 'learning' but I actually knew how to use it anyway, but it managed to jog my memory about how to use it. We were looking at how to animate using pose-to-pose animation, which is pretty much the standard method on Flash. As usual, we animated a bouncing ball, a pendulum, and something extra to have fun with the software. Here's what I made:

I altered the in-betweens by converting the classic tweens to keyframes (if that makes sense). We weren't taught this in class but I'm just kind of accustomed to doing that now.