Tracing footprints in animation
After hitting some roadblocks with the physical computing aspect of my thesis, I decided to put that on the back burner for a bit and focus on the real meat of the project — the animation. While having it be interactive would be great, I realized that without the animation, the project as a whole can’t exist. And so for the past month, I’ve been animating pretty much nonstop, which I gotta say is pretty great!
Yes, 2D traditional animation is frustrating and not without its roadblocks. I had to redo a few sequences a couple times, and for some reason deer grazing bit was an enormous pain. I suspect it was due to the subtle movements and slow action that made the pacing difficult. I even started animating a transformation into a tiger as I was planning to have the deer transform into several animals before turning into a girl, but due to the time crunch I had to cut that down back to my original idea. We’ll just say the deer is an endangered Key deer or Eld’s deer!
But overall, I love drawing, and I love animating. There are certainly moments where I get so frustrated I need to not look at the project or any deer for a day or so, but there really is nothing like seeing a collection of scribbles come to life. It’s fascinating how much goes into making something look like it’s got a mind of its own. There’s the logic of trying to figure out the physics of a movement, the way the weight shifts, the way the rules of animation apply to something that still also has to obey the laws of physics. And then there’s the intimacy of getting into a character’s head. What is she thinking now? How about now? Is she scared? Desperate? Well of course, but she also seems to be a fighter (well would you look at that, that wasn’t in the original storyboard. She surprised even me!), so how long does it take for her to give up? Anyways, the process has been reminding me how much I love animating.
I borrowed the book Cartoon Animation by Preston Blair from Professor Sanders on animation that I’ve been studying and discussing my progress weekly with him. I’ve also been binging animation shorts, studying reference videos, and even taking my own videos. Since taking Animation 1 and 2 with Claire Smuga (who is absolutely wonderful, by the way), I’ve spent most of my time focusing on 3D. We didn’t have time to really go into the principles of animation in those classes, so it was nice to step back and go back to basics and studying the footprints of the “Greats”.
Enough of the shameless animation nerd vomit, time for technical talk:
AnimDessin2 is a live saver. It has its limitations and a couple bugs, but I have minimal qualms with the user interface so far, and it’s made Photoshop animating so much easier!
My process has been: start with roughs. Outline key poses, and go back in certain areas with rough inbetweens as I deem necessary. Lastly, I go over the keys with the final drawing and fill in inbetweens.
I’ve gone a little out of order in the interest of time, and am currently working on the finals in between finishing up my roughs. But we’re getting there!
I hope this long post makes up for the lack updates the past couple weeks. I considered going back and making a bunch of posts to fill up the weekly quota but they would’ve all been pretty much the same thing, and I think this way is much cleaner to follow in one post.
