I helped and guided him in the process and we are very happy with the result, so I want to share with you part of the process.
First he sent me a sketch and told me how he would like to move it:
He wanted to move a little the head and the gun and have the clock blinking.
I took this image, fastly traced it with the freehand in AS and proposed him to add some 3d to the scene:
I trace each part on a different layer and translate each layer position in Z, using Shift+Alt to maintain the visual size. That way it was extremely easy to create the depth effect
My friend loved the idea, so he sent me a psd with each part in a different layer. I asked him to complete some parts of the illustration, even when they could not be visible (because they could be seen while the camera moved)
So we took that psd and organize it in 3d. To give it more movement we created a rig (and it worked very well, even when the layers had different Z positions)
After playing a little with the character and the camera, this is the final gif:
I exported the animation as Mov and then transform it to gif using Corel Photopaint.
And since it was in "3d", I thought it would be nice to have a 3d version of the gif (you will need to cross your eyes):
Well, that's all. I hope you like this and find it informative. It was a fun process.
Oh, and I don't really know why the topic of the image, I think it was part of the assignment.
