Saturday 31 January 2009

To Animating

A week or so into animating the keys now. Took me a while to get into it, and although I'm still slower than I'd like, I feel I'm making progress. Plus for both my story and aesthetic the animation is incredibly important, there is lots of character animation that takes time and needs to be really good. Luckily though the aesthetic I have chosen should be reasonably easy to create so once the animation is done, I'm also (as are most of the 2d people) shooting on digital SLR which will be much quicker than scanning. But I do know I am behind, and really need to pick up the pace.

Had a slight problem deciding how to do my animation, as I normally animate in blue pencil as I like the quality of it. Unfortunately blue pencil doesn't capture or clean up well on the computer. After trying several different ways of animating and cleaning up on a different sheet, i have decided the best option is to do the base animation in blue and clarify and add detail in normal pencil on the same piece of paper. This cleans up better than blue pencil but keeps the construction lines that give the sketchy line quality I'm wanting. Below is a key frame I quickly tried cleaning up.
The first copy is the original file, the 2nd has had threshold applied and the 3rd just levels. Threshold creates the clearest picture and can be turned into just line art and alpha. However I prefer the quality of the line when just levels are used, but this means the texture of the background shows and a pure line art is difficult to create. It may be that this could be used by using blending modes to multiply the image over the background and other layers, this would mean that around the characters there would be a some of the paper texture remaining, but if the edges where feathered it could actually add to the aesthetic.
This will be decided once I have finalised the aesthetic, as I am still developing it, but the most important thing now is to complete the animation.

1 comment:

Jack Bonnington said...

this looks great. i also really like the film youve linked above. if your planning to recreate that kind of aesthetic i think your almost there with this process without using any colour or at last the standard 'fill tool' colour.