Not Sure What Week It Is But Hello

I think most of you probably get the gist of how I’ve been animating at this point, but sometimes I feel like I don’t explain things very well or could be more detailed. And on one of my last posts Keanan asked about how I do it, and I don’t think I ever responded (sorry Keanan) so I’m going to now. While I was working these past couple days I recorded my screen to show you exactly what I’m doing. Unfortunately I only remembered to do that after I’d already gotten some layers down, but you’ll be able to watch almost the entire process.

I’ve been practicing drawing facial expressions because I think I could use some work there. I have this habit where I make whatever expression I’m trying to draw, which is not useful at all but makes people look at me weird sometimes. Anyway, I decided to draw my monster feeling down in the dumps.

Each of these videos was originally about 25-30 minutes long so I’ve sped them up quite a bit. With that in mind, maybe you’ll get a better sense for how long it takes me to animate. I was also working pretty messily here, with basic shapes, scratchy lines, and only a few colors, and a more complex scene would take even more time. 

In the above video I’m drawing the lines. Because most things stay the same from frame to frame, I copy each layer and make minor changes instead of redrawing it each time (which is what I had to do in earlier videos I’ve shared—the walk cycle, the birds, all of the volcano videos). 

Here I start coloring. I make a layer underneath each layer of linework and just color under it. The stripes of colors in the corner are on a separate layer on top of all the others. They make it easy to change my brush color without having to change between layers. 

Apparently I was recording audio too, sorry for the weird sped-up noises in some of these videos.

Now that the coloring is done I can take all of my layers and convert them into an animation. 

This is how you string layers together into video. I’m showing you both ways: create a video timeline (first) and create a frame animation (second). I’m not too sure of the technical differences between the two, because they can both achieve pretty much the same result through different methods. I use the first method to make videos and the second to make gifs. 

This part always seems like it takes forever. Especially for the create-a-video option, I don’t know if there’s a way to shorten all the pieces at once so I have to do each one individually. And I can never decide how fast I want the frames to play, so sometimes I have to change the length of each piece three or four times. But I didn’t fidget with the speed as much as usual here, because it’s such a simple animation. 

I made a mistake in the video that I caught and corrected in the gif. I accidentally switched two layers and the colors ended up on top of the lines for one of the frames:

And here’s the gif:

the colors here are truer to the psd than those in the videos

I think this kind of super-short animation is my favorite. It’s still the same effort-payoff ratio as a longer animation, but it’s less of a commitment and I never get bored of it before I finish, which tends to happen if I try to make a 15+ second scene in one sitting.