Applied Animation - First scene

The first shot of the animation is of dragon picking up Saphiras egg. This is a fairly simple scene however there were a few complications.

The first was animating gradual movement on 25 frames per second is very difficult and the hands movements looked like they were trying to 'grope' the egg so i tried shifting the hands with copy and paste but this eft them robotic looking, so in the end i tried the warp tool which while it caused the hands to be a little deformed resulted in an overall nice shot.

Second thing that was a little awkward to work with was the egg, initially with the swirls on the egg i wanted them to swirl and shift, to make the egg seem alive, so i did this with the smudge tool but this wasn't a good idea either as it just extended what was there and i couldn't add more also the swirls gradually got thinner and thinner so it wasnt consistent so i decided to leave the egg with a non-moving swirl pattern.