This Spider Be Thirsty – Animated Short

The concept of the thirsty spider was another random idea that popped into my head while riding my bike. It was a hot day and, for some reason, this image appeared in my mind with the “pherrrrrhh, so thirsty” line, which made me giggle a little.

Simply, a spider runs down a web line, which snaps as he runs out of web. He turns to camera with a dry throat and a “Pherrrh,” and says, “So thirsty!”

It’s a really short one, and the entire project was completed within four hours — a total of 184 frames — which is a nice break from the huge projects like Elytra Pilot.

I first recorded the voice in DaVinci Resolve, then used music from Epidemic Sound (ES). I actually think finding the right music took just as long as the animation itself. The additional sound effects were also from ES.

The animation was straightforward, using keyframes for the camera motion at the start, and again for the swinging side to side. Then all that was left to animate was the lip-sync mouth and eyes.

A problem I ran into here, though — the old rookie mistake — was that I animated at 30 frames per second in Clip Studio but failed to correct this in DaVinci, which was set to 24 frames per second. Fortunately for me, I needed to shift some of the lip-sync frames as it was running a bit fast, and the change in frame rate between programs seemed to fix that on its own, so I adjusted the audio to suit.

The youtube short can be found on the House of Normal Youtube channel.