Brain Twist

When I visited Koji Morimoto’s website recently I was surprised by a little animation he uses to load the page. It consists of 9 drawings of different shapes and characters that morph beautifully into each other. I managed to extract them from his website to analyze it further:

What I really enjoy about it is how each frame is a drawing on its own, yet they still follow up logically in a sequence. I felt the urge to animate so I took this same concept of a little looping/morphing animation and went ahead and started out with this rough blocking:

After I was content with the overall morphing of the shapes I started filling in those keyframes with some sketches of organisms and animals:

Timing-wise I ultimately settled on 3’s, to give the viewer just enough of a gap to process it all. Then it was just a matter of inbetweening every other frame and cleaning up the drawings. I applied a hint of purple in the lines by overlaying a gradient map.

See the gallery below to see each frame as a seperate drawing.