Grasp the situation!

After studying the reference video I went about making the animation in flash. I simply drew out the rough and loose shape of my hand using the pen tool, and then filled it with, in this case, a blue colour, smoothed and clipped all the lines together, and began tweaking until I had my basic shape.



I had to create two layers to the hand, one for the lighter blue area that you can see, which has the thumb and first finger, and the bottom layer with the remaining fingers, in a darker shade to create some depth to the animation.


To animate I set several keyframes, spanning 15 overall frames, from these keyframes I had to manipulate and stretch the hand illustration to mimmick the reference video, In some cases redrawing aspects of it and filling in the gaps later.

Some frames, as you can see, I made as only rough gestures. I realised that detail wasn't an issue here but rather simplicity of the shape. Your brain fills in the gaps when the animation goes through the cycle!

Despite our initial worries over the quality of the images, the animation itself is a success!