Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Animation Practice



Every Thursday I try and do a bit of animation practice. Bit being the operative word. I get maybe 2 or 3 hours to work on it, and I've been using Flash which is like trying to cycle up a mountainside.

4 comments:

Paula Lawrence Luz said...

For how long have you been animating? And do you have any tips when it comes to timing in Flash? I don't know why, but I have a problem with timing when it comes to Flash but not in the traditional line-test. It's quite irksome.

Nice work, by the way. I've been enjoying you artworks for MONTHS now. And this is the first time I've seen an actual animation of yours. *Barney Stinson's high-pitched voice* AAWWWEEESSOOOOooommmeee!

protowilson said...

Thanks, and I'm glad you like my work!
I've been animating for over ten years now. I was fortunate enough to go straight from college into an animation job (albeit as an inbetweener).
Tming in Flash... well, that's tricky. I think Flash has the capacity to make animators very lazy. It's too easy to rely on the tweening tools and also too easy for stuff to look very formulaic because of it. It's something I struggle with myself. For this particular piece of animation, I actually brush drew the ruffs on another layer, therefore used the software more like a traditional line-tester. Once I had the timing where I was kind of happy with it, I then pretty much re-drew a great portion of the character rather than just moving the symbols about. It's not the most efficient way to work, and I am going to experiment with continuing to do ruffs in Flash, the cleaned-up line (and maybe colour) in Photoshop, and then re-import the jpegs back into Flash and use it as more of a composite tool. I would really love a software that allows an animator to draw directly into the program via Cintiq and that has drawing tools that are a lot better than Flash! Flash just seems to be making things harder rather than easier.

Mariusz Popieluch said...

Nice little piece. What do you think about adding a slight sound fx as he is nudging the painting - something like wood scraping against a wall or something(?)

protowilson said...

Hey Mariusz! Yeah, I should do that. I'll see what I can dig up, foley-wise.