Animation Studio Workshops and Groupwork: Week 10 ‘Line Clean Up and Colouring and Group Animatic Feedback’

Due to a Translink strike leaving many unable to come into university; Week 10 saw classes delivered online, with the morning session comprising of a tutorial on line clean up and colouring – two principles that will be essential to producing a more polished, and professional appearance to my final, simple line-art, and solid fill colouring animation.

Animation clean up involves refining sketches, or storyboard images by cleaning up any rough lines, erasing unnecessary marks, and adding additional detail where required, to transform an already-interesting animation into an immersive and pleasurable experience (Garofalo 2021; brush ninja, 2023).

Here are my before and after versions of this task, which was to clean up and colour an existing flour sack animation.

Before:

After:

All in all, I found this workshop very useful, and while others might find this a mundane task, I actually really enjoy doing this side of animation.

Groupwork:

During the afternoon, we were to join a group Discord channel, where we would receive tutor feedback on our full animatic. However, this was not to be, as I discovered that only I had submitted my animatic on time, and only myself and two other team members (not the other four) actually joined the call. I can’t tell you how demotivated I felt at this time, and wondered, even though completing my assignments was taking up all of my time at home, why others weren’t as committed.

I was promised written feedback, which I received later that evening and gave me some great advice, and the rest of the team were given the weekend to complete their animatics. This however made me a little concerned about my final mark, as I’d rushed to meet the deadline, and given this extra time, could have added the soundtrack, and audio to my animatic, that would have made it more understandable, and appealing.

Written Feedback (1.12.23)

Taking my tutor’s advice on board, I then started animating. However, several days later when the team received recorded feedback on our group animatic, the point was also raised, that as my pan moved from right to left, and Westerners typically read a scene from left to right, that it felt my animation was playing backwards, and if this had been a random choice, I should change this if I could.

I’d also been asked why I’d made this choice, and in truth, I’d read during my research in Mark Byrne’s book, ‘The Art of Layout and Storyboarding,’ that ‘the direction of the pan doesn’t always go from left to right,’ and had just replicated my pan from the image below from his book, but when it was pointed out to me that my animation appeared wrong, even though it would involve a lot of extra work; determined to make it right, I immediately set about amending the shading on all of my queue characters from scratch, as by now I’d merged their layers in Krita, and couldn’t change this to reflect the light source now coming from a different direction.