Earth Pony Sniper Mare [Animated]

New deviation since I switched to animating in After Effects and directly exporting an SWF from there. And I can't replace deviations with a different file type.

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Update 2 (WIP 2):
- Simple shading added to try that out.
- Extended the animation with additional movements (including finer ones)
- SWF instead of GIF
- Played around with puppetry, though I'll probably have to rebuild if I want to do it properly. This suffices for now and I might keep it at this and continue into colouring and shading.
- Left out x-ray view of the spring mechanism on top of the gun, but you can see it in the previous version below.
- Made the top gun spring longer to allow the barrel to move farther back.
- Separated breech, which moves more, from the barrel
- And more...

Next up, Colouring and proper shading. (easy step, animation remains intact mostly)

Update 3: (final) [NOV15]
- Renamed to Earth Pony Sniper Mare
- Did the colours and shading (just going to do the pony)
- Refined the movement a a bit, like her head movement and a bit the barrel, by adding in 'curves' to smooth and time it
- Added 2 extra shots (also to show it's a semi-automatic)
- Added some blur effects to the shots
- Added blinking (quick last minute addition)
- And some minor other things
- Learned a thing or two about how I'd approach a next animation (depending on complexity)
- Added the individual pony parts used to animate this, into the (sketch) WIP down below.

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Earth Pony Sniper adaptation.
Aim with your head and body. Most functions are automated through mechanical solutions, simplifying controls and thus allowing ponies the necessary control.
The gun rests on her head, which will then be used to aim the gun. Moving her head back she also locks it into safety.
On the chest hangs a ring which is connect with the trigger mechanism through a wire, which the pony can pull in order to fire.

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This entire design started with solving the technical side first, going through all the different functionalities and making them "plausible", after that I went into the visual side and animating it.
A "small" experiment as I dabble into animation once again. I've never really focused on that properly, or at least puppetry.

For more details and previous versions, check down below.

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The gun is fired with one of her front hooves holding a ring which is attached to the trigger mechanism through wires (kinda a cheap way of solving it)
When the gun fires the barrel moves back, which is also attached to a spring in the large cylinder on top (which you can see in Animatic WIP 1)
As the gun moves back the breech at the rear moves along with it but also moves a bit further on its own (with internal springs getting that back into place)
This opens up the gun to expel the empty shell and insert a new round.

The new round is inserted into the breech by a revolving mechanism which has 2 grips to grab bullets with. As the barrel moves forward it latches onto the next bullet from the belt attached to the gun.
When the breech moves back and the empty shell is removed, the grips switch places by revolving and everything moves back forward (while also pulling the belt inwards)

Or at least... that's the idea of how to solve the problem of reloading a gun that's placed on your back. I wanted to make sure the pony doesn't have to replenish ammo or reload until after the battle.
That's the reason I gave her a big ammo box with a belt feed to the gun, which I then had to combine into the gun's recoiling barrel mechanism, something I also really wanted to keep (because I like the looks of the barrel moving hehe)

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WIP: