(WIP) MTD "Gesture"

Now that the boring old Keyframe is done, it's time to start animating this garbage.

This ugly piece of shit is the Gesture.

The easiest way I've found so far is making an extremely rough base animation that kind of maintains the original proportions of the initial Keyframe, while also establishing the movement. This is rough and ugly, but moving forward, it becomes much easier to create the full pencil frames by using this and the Keyframe as a foundation. I know some lunatics can straight up just start with something like detailed pencil frames, but holy shit would I not be able to do that.

This portion of the animation probably actually takes the most brain-power, so I do like to take extra time with this. It looks easy, and it honestly is (there's probably only an hour or two of work up there), but I do like to nail down the motion, so I take frequent breaks to reboot the ol' brain and freshen up the ol' eyeballs.

"So Kyde," you may ask, "how would I go about animating something like this?"

It's easy enough, once you figure it out. I think the first instinct someone would have is just starting at frame 1 and starting next on frame 2, but I've found that doing an in-between method is far easier and less prone to have issues pop up.

Here's a hypothetical 24 frame, one second animation. See each of these layers as one step in this in-betweening process. First, create a frame based on the Keyframe. Next, duplicate that frame and paste it on frame 25. This frame won't appear in the final render, as our animation loops when it hits frame 24. Putting your first frame at the very end can help you smoothly loop your last frame back to your first frame.

Next, create the very middle. In this Samus animation, that middle point is where she tilts her head to her left. 

After that, keep doing the in-bewteens and filling in those spaces. Once it's all roughed in, feel free to tweak any frame.

Why not just do it frame-by-frame, first to last? Well, one of the issues you run into is a weird one. One thing I found to happen to me when I tried it that way was a weird shrinking effect. I'd use onion-skins to draw the next frame, but I tended to draw the element slightly smaller than the previous one. When I played the animation, whatever I was drawing appeared to rapidly shrink. 

Another reason is this in-betweening method helps block out every action. You could be animating something and realize you've made too many frames of a hand moving upwards, or a ball dropping or something. If you roughly block in your animation, you'll make sure everything is the right duration.

"So Kyde," you ask, again, "what's with the spaces between each frame? And why are the background characters in that gif above so choppy?"

That's because in animations, 24 frames per second doesn't always mean there are 24 individual frames actually there.

"On-2s" or "On-3s" is animation lingo (I think) for how many frames are actually present in an animation. It basically means one frame is held for however many frames. On-2s means that one frame is held for two frames. On-3s means a frame is held for three frames.

Here's the visual. In a 1-second animation going at 24 frames per second, if it's animated On-2s, then there are actually only 12 frames. On-3's, there are only 8. Why do we do it this way? Because animation is a lot of work, the less work you have to do, the better. It can take over an hour to ink one frame. On-2s, the inking process will take me well over 12 hours total. However, the less frames there are, the shittier and choppier it looks. In the gif above, Samus is animated On-2s, while the Zebesian and Metroid are animated On-6s. I think I can get away with that because they're background characters, and since it'd be much more extra work for things no one will really look at. To further highlight this, look at my previous gifs. FOS and SLG are animated On-3s, while ELV and TAL are animated On-2s. It may just be me, but I think the On-3s are noticeably slower, with way less energy and emotion. That's the difference it can make.

So, you're stuck at an impasse. Do you choose an option that will take less work and be less of a headache to make? Or, do you choose an option that will make a better final product?

"Kyde," you continue to ask, "why do On-2s at all? Why not draw every individual frame?"

Because it's stupid. On-1s looks incredible, but it's a colossal amount of work. One great example is the Thief and the Cobbler. There are scenes in that which are animated On-1s. It's stupidly smooth. However, that took DECADES for them to make, and they never finished it anyways. Ultimately, it's not worth it. You're effectively doubling the time you need to make it. 

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Hopefully doing this behind-the-scenes things are interesting. Next step is the detailed pencils. Keep your eyeholes unclogged for that.