First step was to look at some pictures of spiders to see what the head, body and legs should roughly look like.
Here are a few examples of spiders I found in Google Images.
From looking at these, I thought the legs needed to be longer than the spiders body, I wanted them to be sharp and pointy and scary looking. The abdomen needed to be the largest part of the spider’s body and i wanted to have some markings on it to give it some texture and pattern against the wall backdrop.
Now that I had my spider finished I needed to make it move just as a spider would. I went to Youtube and found some videos of spiders walking along. I payed close attention to how each leg moves individually when one is moving forward, on the opposite side it is staying still and the motion of the spider moving forward actually makes it look as if a leg is just moving backwards. I also noticed that it is the front and rear legs that do the largest movements, the inside ones just seem to shuffle along and I needed to get across with the movements of the animation.
Here is the final animation of the spider walking, I made points at the top of the leg near the body in after effects, which meant I could rotate the legs to make the movement. I made the spider come down to look as if it were about do something and had it quickly retreat as if it were scared of the creature that is coming towards. I did this because I don’t really like spiders, they remind me of the film arachnophobia where a spider comes and kills people. The twist now is that the spider gets eaten and killed.
