July Snapshot #2: 'Descending Ascension' Post-Mortem

Greetings!

I've finally put together a postmortem for you all and I apologize for the delays but here it is! Lets hop into it:

This was one of three projects I started at the end of November/beginning of December in tandem with two other ongoing projects. My hope was that I was able to break down project commitments of two days each thus providing a larger amount of output. On top of this goal I also wanted to try 'roughing' out the animation first to allow fluid and more natural development of movement to then clean up in a latter stage (a common practice by most animation studios.) 

But as it turned out having free time was equally as important and starting off in the first month or so I ended up consolidating the projects into a four day work week which slowed the progression. This was an intriguing experiment but as it stands juggling two projects will yield me extra time to be creative for my own benefit while also having enough diversity between the projects to find an interesting approach to animating them.

Additionally I realized that as nice as it was to play around with the lines redrawing the animation again was a very time-consuming process. What I have decided to use from that is it's application to the Leica reel stage. That way when its approved I can simply work on cleaning up the key-frames before animating the rest in one pass. 

These processes have been refined and reapplied to new projects to see how they work in the changed configurations, but it has provided me some insights to my limits and capabilities. Its also an important reminder about how I can be productive but also manage free time to recuperate my creative energy.

With the examples above you can see the rough pass followed by clean line drawings which are then followed by a simple cel-painting to give the animation its finished look. I didn't add in the colored lines but that was another layer of work to consider as well since I wanted the contour lines of the lizard to pop a bit more - something I saw work well with previous animations and animations of fellow creatives applying their own visual look to the drawings.

Something that developed from this production was the pacing, usually I committed myself to 'five seconds' a week but that can be abstracted based on how many frames I was dedicating myself to. With this project I settled on a flat rate of 12-15 frames a day, which proved to be equally functional for the workloads when I get into the flow of it.

I also discovered the software tools I use can color all cel lines with a single color which would allow me to color grade my layers for different functions (a very useful feature when organizing cels.)

So what have I learned?

- Animate based on a frame volume per day/week.

- Rough animations can still be done in a limited capacity through leica reels.

- Two animated projects is an ideal workload while allowing me to creatively explore other things on the side.

- Established methods of addressing cel painting through a limited palette option.

- Using all the workflows I've discovered so far to create a simpler more established workflow.

I think that covers everything, thanks for reading! If you have any questions about this process don't hesitate to ask in the comment field below!