Wanted: Handy Man

So... After procrastinating all weekend, I finally sat down to work on the bunny yesterday evening. There are some photos here, if you want to traumatize yourself. Yes. This is the harsh dark reality of cute an happy animation. Overweight women sitting around in their underwear, hunched over an animation disc that's propped up on milk crates, a pint of Guinness in easy reach. O_O That quote from Mike Jittlov, "And this is the way animation should be! keeps ringing (wrongly) in my head. ... I'm thinking that if I ever happen to finish a movie worth watching that I'll now have to call myself, Studio Slovenly ... It's honest and has sort of a nice alliteration to it.

Anyhow, back to what I really wanted to talk about: Hands No... that wasn't quite emphatic enough. Let's try again:

HANDS

There. *sigh* I thought I'd figured out how to draw hands... and by in large I have figured out how to draw small cartoon hands. Last night, I tried doing a close-up/high-angle drawing of the two holding hands and the girl pulling her hand away from the Bunny Boy's hand... Turns out, I'd never drawn hands from this angle, nor had I ever drawn them large. The type of hands I've been drawing look fine up to about 1" across, but at 6 or 7 inches across they totally break down and look awful. Adding detail makes them look too weathered. Very frustrating. *sigh* So I guess there's not much for it except to study. It's just sort of disappointing and crippling to my confidence. I really though I'd finally got hands down.

Maybe I should do all my animations about Powerpuff girls and the Schmoo.

Problem Solved, Problem Created

I spent my hour of lunchtime drawing hands, and finally figured out where I was going wrong. It wasn't that I couldn't draw the hands in that position. I was drawing them, over and over again and getting the same unsatisfactory result. Finally, it dawned on my walnut of a brain. It's not the hands that are wrong, it's the camera angle. It's just a very WEAK point of view and it doesn't convey the emotion I was trying to evoke. It needs to be from a lower angle to maximize the effect of pulling back, and I need to be drawing the side the thumbs are on, not the side the pinkies are on. The thumb is VITAL for displaying the depth and tension of the pose. I can make a very emotional and frightened hand from 180 degrees opposite of where I was drawing from.

*sigh* The problem is, that doesn't help me any. I can't do that shot. It completely reverses the screen direction and it would make for a terrible edit. ;-; I don't know what to do. Either I have a really weak dramatic pose, or I have a really confusing edit. I can't really even add more reaction shots to rotate the camera around where that's okay because its several fast edits and it would make the scene spin and that'd be bad too. ;-;

*sigh* maybe If I go straight from behind her hand and do some careful shading on the thumb I can make it work. :/ I guess this is a good lesson for things to look out for during storyboarding. I wonder if all animators learn this stuff the hard way or if I'm just a dummy? :/ ... I think the straight from behind shot will work... I'll try it.

The Return of Stick Squirrel

I no longer have class on Monday nights which means I can participate in the FurryMUCK artist's ambush again, yay! That means... Stick Squirrel lives again!

Stick-squirrel is my attempt at making an animated short on the 30 minutes allotted for the artist's ambush with no planning what-so-ever. As you might guess, it's a bit bumpy. :)

Tonight I tried doing Stick Squirrel on paper rather than the computer. I didn't get to the punch line but did get as far as a cliffhanger, so it was sort of okay, but then I seriously underestimated photography time. Also, I decided at the last minute to do layered artwork rather than single-layer, so photography took longer than planned and I forfeited my entry because I was moving too slow on photography and felt it would have been cheating because I needed to factor it in to my creative time.

Anyhow, after the ambush, I went back and threw some ink over all the drawings (50 drawings in 30 minutes isn't a bad average, neh?) and re-photographed them, then composited the layers on the computer rather than with the disc backlight.

So... Here it is. The continuing Adventures of Stick Squirrel ... For some reason, when I do 'Save as Animated GIF in Premiere', it drops the duration of the part where he's visualizing building the barbell, and the end. Only like the two most important shots. Any idea why? As an AVI they hold the way they should, but in GIF they're 1 frame long. Very frustrating.

-Sammi