For animation I decided I wanted to try another software, I wasn’t really enjoying Krita and I knew Procreate wasn’t the best to make my full animation, so Alyssa introduced me to Clip Studio paint and looking at it it seemed like a more user friendly software to use. So I went and watched some tutorials to understand the software a bit more.
This video was super helpful to understand the whole range of things that I could achieve with this software. I was a bit nervous to start my animation so I went ahead and looked at some examples of rough animation before I started to work myself up to starting and understanding some other animator’s approaches to the pipeline.
The Armenian eagle and lion dance animation. Animated in Harmony and composited in After Effects pic.twitter.com/rYwgMU43cn
— Hayk Manukyan (@Hayk_Animation) March 13, 2021
reel pic.twitter.com/ZHXDtU9mPx
— Road Sign (@ichibombu) April 5, 2021
Here is my very first pass on that same shot I posted before. I first draw a thumbnail planning everything and only after that planning I start the animation with shapes and rough. The drawing is not that important at this stage, only the action and acting. #httyd #DreamWorks pic.twitter.com/xs3llbV0ZK
— Sandro Cleuzo (@InspectorCleuzo) April 29, 2021
Reel update! My name is Maelene, and I'm a freelance character/creature artist and animator who dabbles in a few other subjects as well.
Feel free to DM or email (IceArtzAnimations@gmail.com) if you have any questions or inquiries!
– https://t.co/USQr6eNjKt pic.twitter.com/io04z7bGBG
— ❄️IceArtz❄️ (@IceArtz) September 15, 2020
Alyssa also showed me how to get some free brushes from the shop and I downloaded some I thought looked nice for me, then I did a practice drawing to test how it worked and I was quite happy to see that it worked with my screen tablet unlike Krita which struggled to detect it inconsistently) and so I ended up getting a bit excited to animate.
STARTING MY ROUGHS
So the first thing I did to start my animation was import my backgrounds. I then put them in the order according to my Storyboard. Then I went ahead and made some roughly drawn keys, similar to how I did my animatic. This first pass pass of these were untimed, so I went back and timed them a bit better (at this point I realised I could push the times a bit longer to get some nicer moments).
Then I went ahead and tried to drag these along for rough timing, this didn’t work so well the first time as it was still too quick for what I liked so I did a second pass of this but deleted my frames and reinserted them so I could work on the minor moments instead of the big picture all at once. I left some extra room on the timeline in case I needed to rearrange my timeline in future. but you can see with these new time adjustments I now have about 17 seconds as my run time.
I then used these rough keys as a guide to start my rough animation pass, this time with extremes and breakdowns, this is what my workflow in the programme is looking like. I have my animation folders as layers on my timeline that I have colour coded to help break them up, and I have lowered the opacity of the backgrounds and my rough timed keys.
I actually decided to duplicate the rough keys and slot in some breakdown frames there. This made the action a bit clearer and helped me visualise what frames I needed to put in, as well as showing me certain areas that could use more/less time.
After this I then went and did another pass on a new layer, redrawing all my frames and having a bit of detail, also on this pass I could think about my 12 principles a bit better and look to add my squash and stretch, anticipation, overlapping/secondary action etc. I found this new pass quite hard to start, I tried a couple times each time deleting all my frames. I think I was getting caught up on the whole picture and the details and it was causing a lot of stress, I knew what I wanted it to look like but when I started to draw it wasn’t coming out. I was really struggling and stressed out to the point that I felt sick.
Then I decided I didn’t need to redraw the frames and break them up that way, instead I just needed to add and modify the timings of my previous roughs. Here is an example of what I did, I went over the roughs and filled in the detail like the horns and wings and then on another layer I added the hair on different timings. I am also taking this scene by scene to try and break it into manageable chunks, this approach seems to work for me and I can comfortable put my head down and work.
I continued working this way through my animation until I had my roughs done. I did have some issue trying to animate Azazel’s mouth in the last rough of this sequence so I went and fixed this by keeping his mouth closed as seen in the second sequence.
I was having a little issue working on my last section, there seemed to be a bit of a jump-cut between the shot types so I had to try and sort this out to be smoother. You can see here how startling the cut is and so I went back and redrew my frames as well as changing the background a bit to fit better.
With that my rough animation is finished, I could work on this even more to make it perfect, but since my deadline is coming closer I would prefer to not agonise over this and hand in unfinished work. I can see that my timings aren’t perfect and some of my actions aren’t smooth but it all adds up to letting me improve my work in future and being able to work out how to fix these issues.