The White Rabbit

Bwah,

I inked the corrections to the finger waggling last night. I haven't touched this animation in a couple weeks, but there's only two weeks of animation class remaining this quarter and I'd like to have at least one finished project and realistically, this is the only large project I can get done in that amount of time.

Things I hate

I've come to really hate the White Rabbit. Everything about it. I shot all the video from a 'flat' perspective to hide the distance between the portal matte and the back of the couch, so I'm trapped in this full-on to 3/4ths view of the character and the same for the actress. There's no good reaction shots or anything. Cinematically, it's awful.
I hate my character design. Somehow he became very stiff and his head is off center, giving him a crinked neck look, and his hair is stupid. It doesn't help that I finished all the keyframes and now just need to slog through a bunch of keyframes, witch a stupid character design that it's too late to change. This is probably the single biggest factor holding up completion of this project. *sigh* I know I should just bull through it and get it done, even if I hate it, just so I can move on.

Things I've learned

• How to draw cartoon hands! Yay! It finally clicked. Somehow I'm suddenly able to draw simple, understandable hands from most any angle. I guess all I needed was a LOT of repetition.


• Do pencil-tests first as raw forms with as few possible distracting character features.


• Do a preliminary story-board before putting heavy amounts of design into the character.


• Make DOZENS of character design sketches before doing a single piece of animation, not just 2 or 3. Add sketches which present character and relate to the story, not just proportions.


• Pencil test a couple of simple actions. Test them, flesh them out as the character, then test them again.


• Make more character sketches based off pencil test results, refining the character.


• Refine and clean up story board. Add in the real characters


• When working with video and animation mix, work out desired timing BEFORE shooting video. Make actors act to desired timing as best possible, then study timing of video and create accurate animation timing.


• When working out timing, trust your own math, not Premiere's timeline!!!!

I guess that's all for this post. Any tips/suggestions/etc would be appreciated.

Budget Animation

Probably no one cares, but I thought I'd list out my steps for getting near professional quality animation on a shoestring budget.

• Buy box of printer paper.


• Hole-punch printer paper. (I use my school's animation punch, but a 3-hole punch will do if you're making your own registry


• Pencil animation


• Pencil-test animation... You can use a webcam and Premiere or Flash or freeware like Anasazi or Virtual Dub or Gif Construction Set. You could also use a scanner here but it'd be slow and tedious. A cheapo camera is a better solution.


• Revise pencils and repeat previous step as needed.


• Ink drawings. (You could do this on the paper if you draw light, or you could put another page over it and trace, like I do)


• Photograph inked drawings and convert them to 2-colour mode. (Posterize in Premiere or Photoshop) and save them as some exact format. GIF, TIF, TGA.


• Import files into flash and use 'Trace Bitmap' to convert them to vectors (you'll need to fiddle with settings a bit here to get the look you want)

From here, you can colour your drawings and save them as symbols. Since they're now vectors, you can scale them as much as you want without mangling them, flip them left to right, put them on any layer without colour issues, etc. You're basically doing what you could do with a program like Toonz but for the cost of Flash. When you get everything set up how you want it, you can do a save-to-quicktime(or AVI)at some large resolution, do all your titling and transitions in a program that is less frustrating than Flash, and export it to tape or DVD at full resolution.
It seems to be the best of all worlds. You get the personality of pencil art, the vectory computer ability to fiddle with things to perfection, and you can (theoretically) make theatre-quality presentations using a 640x480 webcam. This approach should work on any computer built within the last decade too. No need for blindingly fast top of the line, 300 dual-2Ghz processor render-farms. A pencil, a webcam, and a second-hand computer will do.

Of course, there's lotsa things one could do to make this process better. Trace the pencils with a tablet, for instance, and skip the conversion steps. My point was just that for < $1000 anyone could be doing at the very least broadcast-quality animation. So... What are you waiting for? :)