(WIP) MTD Postmortem

Welp, this is as far as I got before my beloved tablet died. I'm handling my loss pretty well. 

Anyways, these are some of the pencils. As you can see, the animation is starting to look like something at this point. Maybe this looks impressive or whatever, but it's actually one of the easier parts of this whole process. Like I said in the previous WIP post, at this stage, I use a combination of the Keyframe and the Gesture to do this. There is still some thought involved in making this, however it's not nearly as brain-intensive as making the Keyframe or the Gesture. Both the Keyframe and the Gesture stage are largely making something out of nothing. It's nearly purely creative. This stage, however, has so much foundation to it. How it feels to me is redrawing the Keyframe 12 times, except slightly different each time. "Labor-intensive" is how I'd describe it. 

Now, I don't draw it frame-by-frame. What I do is draw it element-by-element. What does that mean? Basically, I focus on one thing, one "element," like, say, her ponytail. I animate the entire thing, all the way through, before I move onto the next element, something like her left arm, or her collarbones, or the right side of her waist, or her hands, or whatever. Dividing it up into small portions not only reduces the chances for some errors, but it also breaks the work up into smaller components so it's not so arduous. I'm sure if I drew out the entire thing frame by frame, it'd become quickly misery-inducing.

I also don't go from the first frame to the last frame in this stage, either, nor do I do the inbetweening method I use for the Gesture stage. Instead I start from the beginning, work forward until the middle, then start from the end and work backwards to the middle. So, I start at Frame 01, work forward to Frame 06, jump to Frame 12, then work backwards to Frame 07. This may sound stupid and confusing, but it really helps to do it this way, it ensures a good loop is achieved. It's hard to explain in writing, but it works, trust me. I'll also do something similar in the case of Sequence animations, like FOS. I made FOS entirely backwards. Seriously, it works.

There's really not much else to say for this stage. I really don't think too hard when I work on this part. There are inevitably issues to fix from the Gesture stage, but like, that's a given, and pretty easy to fix.

Stay tuned for my further descent into grief and sorrow, and for the inevitable Lineart update at some point in the future. That stage is easily the most mindless, and one that I freely and openly hate. It'll also be short, there's hardly anything to say of that stage. However, Color is after that one, is my favorite stage, is super fun, and will definitely be more fun to talk about.