Going Ape

I took a bit of a break from working on TAC today to get a few drawings done for an animation I'm doing for Carse & Waterman. The client is National Geographic, and I've been asked to do a short animation involving an ape walking on-screen and gradually transforming into a human, before looking up and having the title of the show land on him.

I've never really drawn an ape before, so I found a reference picture of the classic "evolution of man" line-up and did a few quick sketches from that. 

I'd been given a particular style that I needed to work in, so these were a few quick doodles I did to sort of get the hang of it. 

And this was a little test to see how the different stages of the transformation might look. I'm not sure as of yet how I'll do the animation, but I'm thinking a mixture of cut-out for the walking and then drawn for the transformations. To save time, I'll likely do all the drawing straight into Toon Boom as opposed to doing them in Paint Tool SAI as I usually do.