Hi everyone,
This week I finally began to actually animate—just a few dozen frames of the opening scene, but still more than I expected to have done at this point. I’ve been reminded all over again of just how many frames are necessary to make motion look smooth and how so much drawing work is condensed into a couple of seconds. This rough draft has 53 frames in 4 seconds and needs intermediates to complete the motion (24—30 fps is typical in professional animation):
Though drawing frames can be time-consuming, the most tedious aspect for me is putting them all in a timeline, arranging them, and changing their lengths. The longest animation I've ever made had 800 layers and ordering them took a criminally long time. Here's how my current layers stack:
I’m beginning to love Photoshop’s gradient tool, just because it can give so much dimension to a flat shape with very little work on my part. I don’t have a ton of practice with digital art, but I can definitely see the benefits.
Part of the reason I’ve started to animate earlier than I had planned is my color script. These are typically used by artists to provide an overview of all the visuals in a film; the header image of this blog is in fact part of the color script for Finding Nemo. I really enjoy looking at concept art for animated movies, so I’m fairly familiar with the beautiful, detailed scripts made by Pixar that could almost stand alone as illustrated books. But while I was working on my own script, I realized that I didn’t want to dedicate much time to drawing exactly what I would later recreate in Photoshop. I think one of my main faults as an artist is my distaste for planning, which makes me tend to dive into projects and prevents me from doing many preliminary sketches. It also made me unwilling to put a lot of effort into my sketches only to recreate them all over again.
But the most significant factor in my decision to treat my script as a collection of thumbnails rather than dedicated storyboarding was my materials. I prefer to draw in either ink or oil pastel, and chose to use pastels for the script because they’re fast, easy to smudge, and more vibrant (they're also the usual medium of Pixar color scripts). I needed to draw too many thumbnails to use the expensive pastels I usually reserve for large-scale drawings, but my cheaper pastels did not layer color very well. For these reasons, my color script is a lot more primitive than I imagined it would be when I first began thinking about it in December. Still, it gives me a good blueprint to work off. Here are the first two pages:
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| You can see how the first page is similar to the animation |
And there you have it; that's where I'm at right now. I’m continuing to experiment with background painting, and I want to pin that down as I continue into next week. I really love the style of Steven Universe landscapes, with lots of smooth layered shapes, and will probably somewhat emulate/incorporate that. In addition I'll be making more jumpy practice animations and trying to figure out which texture brushes I like best.
Until next time,
Rachel
Whoa! Nice volcano, bud. A few questions: What are intermediates? What is the longest animation you've ever made? Why are the little purple lines not all lined up? What is a gradient tool? Now, some not questions: Your first two pages of the color script look fascinating. I'm excited to find out what the leafy figure is. To me, a non-artist person whose opinion on this is completely irrelevant, it seems that your distaste for planning is actually saving you time and effort, and is maybe less of a fault than you claim.
ReplyDeleteBy intermediates I mean filler frames that make the motion smoother; I don't think that's a technical term but it's how I think of the extra frames that I go back and put in the choppy places. The longest animation I've ever made was actually stop-motion with chalk, it was around twelves minutes long. The purple lines are the frames in the timeline, and they're staggered because if they were lined up, they'd all be visible at once (so you'd see each drawing on top of the other rather than in succession). The gradient tool just fills shapes with color gradients, which means I can kind of imply shadows without actually drawing them or add depth to things with minimal effort.
DeleteThanks. What's the difference between stop-motion and what you're doing in this project?
DeleteStop motion is taking photos and stringing them together, with little movements in between (well known examples would be Wallace and Gromit, Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, all those weird old Christmas movies). There's actually a chalk stop motion music video somewhere that I spent a weird amount of time watching while I was making my own stop motion, but I can't remember the name of it right now. And the difference between that and my project is that I'm drawing each frame rather than photographing each frame.
DeleteFascinating to see your process, Rachel! I really appreciate the honesty in your blog. I can better understand why Pixar movies can take sometimes 5 years to create!
ReplyDeleteWhat has been the most surprising part of the process for you so far?
Since I've mostly been concerning myself with backgrounds, I think the most surprising part has been how difficult it can be to create depth. I'm used to the texture of traditional media and the ability to blend color easily, and now I can't rely on either of those to make an image feel like it has space. It's been really interesting to figure out how to do that digitally.
DeleteThis is honestly so cool. I really love your animation. It's cool to learn just how many frames you need just for a short clip!
ReplyDeleteNice to see some animation so soon! Really interested to see how exactly the fillers work because I knew why they were used but I never truly understood how they do what they do.
ReplyDelete