Process

I'm gonna go a little into the... process, of sorts, that I have sort of developed whilst animating. Note that this differs for a lot of shots depending on complexity and botheredness and the number of attempted shortcuts, but you'll get the gist.

1. Thumbnails. This includes anticipation and follow through poses. The times I didn't do them (really short shots, simple movements, that sod) I generally left out anticipation etc. and told myself it'd be quick enough that it would look alright. It generally didn't. (On that topic, do anticipation and follow through poses count as keyposes? I didn't know how to categorise them so I've been circling them as keyposes, but then every second number ends up circled so that the entire system feels redundant.) Oh yeah and line of action. It's a good reference sheet for that when you get caught up in the details on the real thing.
2. Roughing out keyposes. I do this in blue. Man, I totally take back what I said about the col-erase before; you get used to them and they are indispensable. I can do such clean drawings in HB now... anyway, this is so you can quickly see if the action works when you do the...
3. Pencil test. Usually I hate doing the whole, take photos of everything and check movement,wash, rinse, repeat- as essential as it is- and try to minimalise number of repeats, but I found that doing one at this stage saves a lot of bother down the track. Unless you do this part digitally, but I prefer not to, as then I can draw directly over my ruffs instead of copying them or whatever. I use this stage to work out my preliminary...
4. Timing. Or doping. I tried doing that first but I got it wrong more often that way, so this is my order of things. I also tried using dope sheets, but I guess my unwillingness to waste more paper and ink than I do already has me just drawing keycharts all over my thumbnailing sheet instead. They don't really go into such silly details in the books. Anyway, I still get my timing wrong lots doing this though; it's like when you animate in stepped and have to massively change the timing when you change to spline in 3D. The feel is just really different, it is so hard to tell. But since there is less freedom to adjust in 2D, I try to reuse similar timings that have worked in other shots. Otherwise, it's very arbitrary. Here is the rough pencil test of one of my better shots. 
5. Clean-up keyposes. They tell you to clean up at the end in the books, but that doesn't address the issue of how I do accurate in-betweens in that case, so either I read the books wrong or... well, this is my way.
6. Breakdowns/In-betweens. Depending on how secure or time threatened I feel, I would then go about filling everything in, with maybe some pencil tests interleaved. Mostly without, because I am time pressed. I would prefer to draw too many in-betweens and cut them out than draw too little and have to repeatedly boot up my laptop to test it. Anyway, eventually I get to some barely passable stage and that's a completed shot. This one here is mostly complete, except for the ending.

I reckon if I actually followed this foolproof master plan I could probably churn out some half decent animation. But, reality. And I find that I get a lot of shots that simply don't work; in that case the best thing to do is start over. But, rush job.

I am trying not to think about the inking.

^One of my crappier attempts, this one went through quite a few iterations. And I still hate it.

Animating in winter

Certain difficulties arise from animating in winter, which may or may not be me-specific.

Circumstances require me to adopt a distinctly un-OHS position when working.

(pseudo scientific diagram)

Other circumstances require me to breathe.

Unpleasantness results. 

Solution:

Consistency

Consistency is a very important aspect of animation, I find. There's character consistency of course, and that's what a character reference sheet is for. Otherwise, they'll probably start evolving. My reference is a little dodgy, like everything else I do, and I draw basically a morph of the dude on the sheet and my maquette, which was based off an earlier model, smart kid I am. Not ideal, but it's alright.

Then there's the animation itself. I think that's an area I am being too lax in. There's many different styles of animating: fast, sharp, light and bouncy, slow and smooth etc. Being a virtual beginner in this area, I am not too aware of the differences, and how to employ them; my main concern is believability, at my level. And I would assume that being a team of one would make that less cause for concern. But style clash, if it happened, would not be pretty, for next to how they look, a great defining characteristic of a character is how they move.

Which brings me to my third point. For our film and animation projects we are taught to create character bibles which define a character's world, their needs, desires, motivations. And in pre-production mode, I thought all of it was obvious, right there at the back of my head when I needed it. But in pre-production mode, that's all you think about, right, you're developing the story, so you basically are living in the character's minds. In production mode, your mind is on other things:

• timing
• gesture
• anatomy
• drawing to model
• anticipation
• follow-through
• overlap
• squash and stretch
• catching up to where you're meant to be on your schedule

So on and so forth. What is easy to forget, however, is that all that is informed by the character as an entity in a story, or as an individual who is alive. Everything is for a reason. There must be thought behind the action, as we were told in my 3D character animation class. And, excellent student I am, I have not looked at my bibles since I handed them in for marking.

Thoughts of a hypocritical amateur.

Colour script

Forced myself to finish the colour script this week:

I tried to get a gradual progression in the lighting, but gave up halfway. It wasn't worth it; it was better that each shot looks at least fine itself, if that makes sense. That meant I ended up with the first half doused in yellow light, and the second half in purple for some reason, but it's not as bad as I first imagined. But I might have mentioned this earlier, but I found that lighting conditions look wrong unless the characters are themselves correctly shaded, fitting them into their environment. As I don't really want to shade my boys, I'm hoping faux shading with a gradient layer over the top will be enough to convince. I should of course try this out, but... later.

Some shots did look much better in black, white and red, but the shots that look better with colour look that much better that I think colour is decided.

In other news, I am behind 6 shots in animation, the ones I have done look crap and I haven't done any backgrounds or inking at all. This is looking promising.

Observation

Animating a small, slow movement:

2D = 1-2 hours
3D = 30 seconds

Sometimes I wish I had condensed my story a little more so I would be able to fit in those couple of hours.

Animation commence

Week 1 of break, and I am pleased to say I am finally getting into animating, after half a week of bludge. It is going ridiculously slowly however, what with booting up the computer every time I need to test the timing (and getting ridiculously distracted every time I am online). For my second shot (yes I am only on my second shot), I tried using my new col-erase pencils for ruffs. Everywhere I looked, animators seemed to swear by them, so I thought it'd be neat to get a set. Unfortunately, I found them hard to get used to. It is probably because mine were light blue, but the lines are so faint they practically disappear with a light underneath them, and the lead is hard enough that if I tried to make it darker the paper gets massively indented and ruined. Confused, I googled the pencils again, and found that it is the lightness that makes them desirable for scanning and photocopying, and the hardness for the lack of smudging. Fair enough. So I decided to only use them for the extra broad, messy guidelines, then tighten up with a normal HB. It would involve erasing after inking, but I guess that can't be helped, and there would be less to erase anyhow.



On a side note, I have requested a new melody and working over for the music as I have decided that it is simply not working.



I don't know, I think it was because I really liked the melody, that I managed to convince myself that it was working. But I think it is probably better for my cause to just admit it early that I need something better suited. Of course it wasn't helping that all he had was a piano... so I found this nice piece of free software he could compose on:
http://musescore.org/

Plus, I have a potential laughing child; I have managed to get my cousin's son to agree to record his mother's sister's 4 yr old daughter for me, although I am not sure how the quality will turn out. Nevertheless, it is better than nothing.