Traditional animation is a series of drawings usually of a complete character in a pose. These were drawn using a pencil on paper. These were then copied onto acetate sheet, a see through plastic sheet with location slots along the top edges.
Sprite animation is a series of sprites, which can individually manipulated to form a complete character. This technique was pioneered in cell animation by spreading the character across a series of cell layer on top of each other. Areas not drawn on were transparent.
Since computerised drawing tools have become standard, there are packages that allow the same process. Some of these include a spine, which simulates the links and motions of the characters spine to be simulationed.
The Head in this example is such a series of 6 Sprites. At this point I am experimenting with techniques of Sprite production. The head rotation is acheived within Pencil2D as is the size adjustments in the title screen.
The animation is composed of 4 layers and is 100 frames duration at 6 fps.
The grey line around the edges is to show where the frames finish. This is not required when displaying the animated GIF file on this Discord service. But when displayed on a computer screen, any unused area on screen, within the display window, by default is coloured black. With GIF files this is a hangover from the early days of showing GIF’s on the Internet.
Incidentally the GIF file is 155k bytes and the equivalent. MP4 file is 71k bytes.