When doing the roughs for my animation, I didn’t work on the shots in chronological order. I started off with the shots I thought would be the easiest to get out of the way first. So while I have the roughs and progress presented in their final order here, I worked on these in different stages.
For the first shots 1 and 2, I was worried about having to animate the elephant seal, so I did some animation tests figuring out how to animate the seal moving and getting taller in order to attack. These studies were both fun and frustrating at times, as my first initial animation study turned out well but subsequent attempts did not. Below are some of the study results and some videos showcasing the process of drawing them.
Shot 1 Roughs & Progress
Basic movement for the seal being caught off guard by the fox landing on his nose and also for the fox bouncing off to land on the ground
Added in more frames for the fox movement, it looked a lot better but still lacked something. I initially thought a twist would be good when the fox jumps off but avoided adding it at the beginning because I was unsure of how to draw it.
I found a good reference for adding in a twist when the fox just bounces off from the seal’s nose. With this added I think it feels a lot more interesting. The animation for this fox in this shot is a combination of me referencing many different videos to get what I wanted.
Shot 2 Roughs & Progress:
Rimlight test and adjustment to camera movement
The issues that I had with these roughs:
- Its clear that its 2d objects rotating in a 3d space
- Keeps a lot of its 2-dimensionality – looks off
- Want to create as close as possible to the illusion of it looking 2.5d
- Experiment with stroke placement and drawing planes to make it seem more natural when camera rotates.
- Some of the rotations and positions of different 2d objects also is off, some parts like amka hiding the bush seem out of perspective and a bit out of place.
- Change the projection of the seal shadow to top down view – might help with perspective?
- Speed of the rotation of camera and objects
Video references that I used for this shot as well as shot 2:
Shot 3 Roughs & Progress:
With these roughs I was focused on getting in my frames I wanted. I didn’t really apply any timing, aside from in the second clip, it is slowed down to more easily see the change in expression.
Face details are drawn in/semi-coloured and a rough for Amka’s hair.
Hair lineart
Added blender’s noise modifier to get the wobble effect in order to try and emphasise Amka’s emotion and force of the shout. Also blurred out Boba (the fish) in the background to add some depth.
I still felt it wasn’t that effective so I animated a camera shake which looks a bit better. I wasn’t sure whether to keep this for the final animation, but ended up using it to add some variation and also because after going through finishing up the other shots, I reset the camera as necessary and I would have to reanimate the camera. I probably should have made multiple camera objects and its something I will remember to do in the future.
The video references I found useful for animating the shout:
I wanted references that were exaggerated so that I could easily pick out keyframes and expressions I need for my own animation so I thought using shout references from the show Vikings were exactly what I was looking for
Shot 4 Roughs & Progress:
Unused rough/practice for Amka jumping from the bush, I didn’t intend to use it at all for the animation but did it as a warm-up.
Very basic run rough, used a quick placeholder for my WIP presentation and in the first rough pass to figure out the timing and length of the final animation.
Slightly better rough that I made with the help of this video tutorial below. There are some actual human forms in here, which made it easier to draw in the clothes and forms of Amka in later roughs.
Drew in the clothes, and added a greyscale fill.
Secondary animation – roughs for the hair and necklace.
Final cleaned lineart and greyscale fill with rim lighting.
Shot 5 Roughs & Progress:
I decided to animate this on 4s to save time, it lacks fluidity but I thought it wouldn’t be too bad to lower the amount of frames here as long as its still able to convey what happening. I used this video from 0:58 onwards and so the rough looks as if Amka is facing towards the camera. I adjusted this in the next rough, so that she’s facing the other way as the camera changes 180 degrees.
Refined rough with coloured and post-processed bushes in foreground.
Rough with character’s clothes added in. I think a bit of clarity is lost from the first roughs to this one but I still think you can tell she is recovering from her running.
The final shot, I cleaned up the lineart, added Amka’s hair and the fox and seal characters into the scene. I think the placement and appearance of the fox and seal could be better but its the best I could do considering the deadline. The roughs for shots 6 and 7 can be seen in the first full rough pass below. Since they are mostly still images, they didn’t need as many rough passes so I went from their roughs straight to the final pass.
In the first rough pass I felt a lot of the shots were happening too fast, the animation needed more refinement and frames.
Second full rough pass
The second “rough” pass is pretty close to the final stage of the animation, its mostly coloured, has clean lineart, post-processing effects. However there were still some issues I wanted to address before I was mostly satisfied with the animation.
I wanted the scene with Amka’s shout to hold for longer, however I couldn’t do this as mentioned earlier I would have to reanimate the camera and add the noise effects. I was able to hold the scene where the seal becomes happy, fix the glitching hands in the final shot and clean up the lineart for shot 4 where Amka is running.
The glitch in her hands in the last shot was happening as they are a separate object from her body. I thought I initially fixed this by having her hands come out from the body object on the Y axis so it wasn’t at a value of 0, however I only applied this to the first frame. Any frame after that the hands moved right back to 0 on the Y, conflicting with the body causing the glitch.
I made sure the hands were not at 0 on Y the axis for all keyframes, so the value was set to 0.2+m.
Fixed shot 7 + added snow transition: