Now that my rough animation was done, I could start trying to clean it up. This was quite a daunting process to me as I have never really stepped past this stage in art, I usually sketch and move on, but I wanted to try push myself to line my animation and give it some colour.
Throughout this entire process, line art in particular has been a struggle for me, I just haven’t put in a lot of practice to it. So I went ahead and tried to line my animations, breaking it into more manageable pieces. SO I started with Azazel’s body and just gave it my best go. I did find myself getting frustrated and comparing it to how nice the sketch look in comparison. I found that I ended up rushing through the line art because I got worried I wouldn’t be able to finish it all and this reflects in how bumpy my first pass of line art looks. It was awful and disheartening, so I decided to restart this but try take a slower and careful approach, focussing on the first 8 seconds that we would be marked on and if I had time after I could add to my length.
I was really panicking over this as I had attempted this a couple of times, but I went and talked to Sarah and she said that because I was more comfortable with the sketchy style, I could go back and make my roughs a bit stronger and use this more sketchy style. With this news I had a newfound confidence and excitement to work on my sequence. I clipped a hue/sat/lum layer on my folders to change the secondary action lines to black which allowed me to quickly change it to what would be my line art. I’m very happy that I was able to keep this comfortable to my style, because I really liked being able to focus on the action and not the line quality.
You can see the progression of how bolding out my lines helps a bit on the clarity, I also adjusted the opacity of the background to test how it would look. My background colours are quite dark and atmospheric so I decided I may need to do a quick colour pass on these so that I can help my lines stand out. I really liked how this was coming along and it allowed me to correct my lines
I sent a version of this to my group and Joyce said that I should hold the watch frame for a bit longer, so the audience can read it better and I will do this in I movie. These are my bolded out lines, I thought of doing a pass on the hair but I could also try add some colours to better distinguish my lines from my dark background, alternatively I might decide to go for colour line art to fix this issue as well. I was quite happy with how smooth some of my actions were looking, but as I kept working on this I kept seeing a lot more mistakes and maybe unknown actions, like how the drawing paper at the start disappears or how the passing of the earring to Azazel’s other hand isn’t shown on screen and the most noticeable is how jumpy the characters seem because I have looser lines that make up the characters. I still carried on even with these mistakes to try make it the best I could for now.
While the coloured line art does work to separate the lines from the background, it has a very startling effect, I can use this in future animations with different stylisations but I didn’t like how it turned out here.
I also started to add some colour in my lines, but I’m not quite sure if I liked how it was turning out and that by adding this I was adding even more inconsistency into my animation. I think at this point I was too nervous to ADD more elements becuase I was worried it would start to distract and take away from my nice smooth movements.
I quickly decided to put this through iMovie to add my longer timing on the watch frame, and my fade to black at the end and I am happy to say this both worked well.
With this majorly done I still decided to go back and do a couple final passes before my deadline, to see if I could improve it any further or submit alternate versions. Like I mentioned earlier, I was getting a bit protective over my previous work so I intend to submit a version with just my sketchy lines and a low opacity background so the action is readable and another possibly with colour and sound. Below is what I submitted for this deadline, I may make more versions of this over the break between semesters.
I can say that I was overambitious with what I could achieve with my limited experience, and I am beating myself up over the fact that I couldn’t make a professional quality animation right off the bat but I have enjoyed this whole process and even if I don’t fully finish this animation this semester I do hope in future to learn how to approach more finished looking pieces. I had really hoped to have colour and lighting done but for my skill level I just wasn’t able to but, I am learning that it is fine to make messy pieces, not everything needs to be perfect because I am still learning and exploring and I just need to remind myself of this.