June Snapshot #2: Post-Mortem Report & Sketches!

Greetings everyone,

My sincerest apologies for the missed posting on Saturday, since Wednesday was coming up so quickly I figured I would just combine both posts into one. 

Lupine Vocaloid Post-Mortem:

As with all projects I complete, I wanted to examine a bit on what the animation, known as 'Lupine Vocaloid' involved, what goals I wanted to achieve as well as what worked and what didn't. So with that in mind, lets start with the some of goals in mind:

Each project I work on usually involves some kind of new technique, technology or process. In this one I wanted to see what roughing out the animation initially before cleaning it up would be like. The reason I wanted to shuffle this formula around was because I felt I had a more fluid and natural look to the motion of the animation when I roughed out the segments, allowing for lots of editing, changes and despite its messy nature a satisfying flow to the narrative animation as a whole. This animation also involved panning, transformation themes (female human to male werewolf), tearing of fabrics & fluid dynamics.

The aforementioned ideas seem pretty humble in terms of ambitions and I decided to employ this approach with the project. Something also worth mentioning was the timing of the project's start. I already had a pretty hefty project in its final stages but taking considerable time to complete (nearing 5 months by that point) so I wanted to explore having 3 ongoing projects at once. Ideally I could commit 2 days to each project a week but that would also result in fewer free days which might be harder for other aspects of my life to accommodate. Therefore realistically I settled on 2 days for the big project and one day each for the other two. 

This particular project therefore received one day of work each week for the first month of its production, it wasn't too problematic since the earliest stages of the animating. That wasn't to mean it was a smooth and quick process. A bout of various interruptions, sickness, etc had me delaying the completion of this, although the biggest contributor was the clean up stage of the project itself. I often try to avoid going back over things in passese since it usually means a lot of work with ensuring continuity and correct application. So one pass in story-boarding, one pass in rough, and one pass in clean lines - sounds like a straightforward and simple process but careful line work in particular can be very time consuming, on top of the time spent working out the improvisational acting. You can see in the attached images above with a screenshot of the workspace I had for this project having the timeline scaled down as far as I could go (even though I couldn't fit the whole timeline in it!) it can help in contextualizing why streamlining this process can be important.

Despite the setbacks and slower progression I actually developed a system to pick up the pace when I was seeing things being drawn out too long. Something along the lines of 12-15 cels drawn each day was the order of the day. It was relatively intense but it left me with about 20 minutes per cel to work out details and anything I wanted to experiment with. Whether this model will work across future projects is a matter of testing but it did move the project along quickly and give me a better idea on my milestones.

So! What did I learned from all this? 

- Time is valuable! So while having some buffer to experiment is important, jumping straight into cleaned cels for each stage is a big time saver over the more measured roughs to the clean drawings approach. I like the latter idea but it is probably better suited for work with another animator or team of animators.

- Cameras in the software solutions I use are temperamental so minimizing it or applying a segmented approach would be easier for the production itself (at least until I get work going with blender to see how that pans out.)

- Working with a quota of frames instead of a length of time for frame types offers far more clarity and efficiency to a project

I think that about wraps up the overall review of the previous project. It still was an absolute treat to work on and I learned a lot of things along the way. But having written a small novel its time to move on...

Sketches:

In the past week I've been interacting with various members on discord and other social platforms, its always good fun to immerse one self in creative endeavors and having discovered that one of them lacked a conceptualized sona I was happy to offer some interesting ideas for designs. Although they served more as a directional concept, I had fun exploring the different variations of patterns and anatomy for anthropomorphic rats, latter sketches will involve a variety of other random subjects but you get the idea. 

Having worked more with color since the beginning I'm very keen on exploring environmental illustration using digital pencil and watercolor (although I'll likely do the same with real brushes too.) This is something I want to incorporate more in my animations having a fully fleshed out environment and easing into it with creative passes first might be a good first step. Time will tell.

Alright! That's everything I wanted to cover today! I'll be returning to our regularly scheduled program for this week. Thanks for reading and catch you all in the next snapshot!