The reason I say zebras are one of the worst animals for animation is the one thing horses don't have, which is stripes. What sucks away time isn't the fact you have to draw on the stripes of ten frames of zebra, that's easy, it's what the movement looks like when you've put all the stripes on and this is the difference between stripes that look like they move with the zebra and stripes that literally look like they have a mind of their own. A lot of R & D for me has been in this section, trying to work out how to make the stripes move with the zebra without making it look like a jittering mess of lines. I tried drawing stripes on one frame then copying and pasting the same stripes onto the other nine frames and just moving them into the places they'd be in relation to the position of the zebra but this looked like the stripes weren't connected to the zebra and didn't reflect muscle movement in the way I wanted to. I also tried keeping the stripes static to minimise any eye confusion but had the same effect. The option I had left was drawing the stripes manually by following the movement of the zebra and disregarding stripe shape, allowing them to change between frames. Although there was some improvement, the irregular shapes caused too much jitter which would put people off looking at the zebra for too long. So for the finished product below, I had to compromise between the two, limiting the stripes movement and keeping them at a similar shape, but allowing them to change. This I did by copying and pasting like I did in trial 1 but tracing over the stripes for each frame when they were in the correct place to make it a bit more natural than mechanical.
Next job is making a herd, and for most studios, it's a simple duplication and offsetting the cycles which I've done below but on playing it back, I may vary stripe shapes on a few zebra just so it looks less like a copy and paste job
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