How Nuria Boj Does Frame-by-Frame Animation

Nuria Boj joined the Closer&Closer roster after many years of working at a production company. This background taught her a thing or two about how to make a great animation, and she’s carried those skills into her freelance career! 

She used her animation chops to create this frame-by-frame animation titled “Fish Ride.” If you’re as intrigued by the practice as we are, check out how she got to this beautiful final piece and hear a little insight on the importance of animation directly from Nuria herself. 

These first two GIFs show how Nuria starts with basic shapes to figure out how the shapes that make up the character can move. Then, she begins to define the features of the character and turn it into a fish!

Next, Nuria begins to create the illustration of the main character, add more details, and smooth out the movement. This last GIF shows her work very close to the final thing, where she added color and finished polishing to make the flying fish and his fabulous friend you see up top.

Nuria says she loves frame-by-frame animation because it “is a fantastic opportunity to understand movement in general by practising the key principles of animation. This can prove useful even if you only use After Effects for your work, it still uses the same principles. It also requires a lot of drawing which is what I enjoy doing too but it’s hard to get the movement of characters to ‘feel’ right or at least how I had imagined them like.”

If you want to read about Nuria’s process in more detail, check out her full deep dive into this project on her website here.