WIP 0107

I ended up finishing this small animation project during the weekend so I'm making you all the first peeps to see this!  This'll be a bit of a post so buckle up!

So talking about the process, I'm going to break it down per step even though I pretty much went back and forth on different steps rather than focusing on one step at a time.

1. Rough Pass

Animation was simple enough: do a couple of head turns and some minimal movement (how hard could this be?). I tried my best in getting the poses down but looking back, I think they could've been better? This stage pretty much set up the whole thing.

2. Sketch Pass

Basically me tidying up forms and keeping the animation principles in mind like secondary actions, anticipation, arcs, timing, squash and stretch--the sorts! I've never officially took animation lessons so I was trial and error-ing this whole part and working with what "felt" and "looked" right!

3. Clean-up/FX & Lighting Sketch Pass

I ended up going for the final lines but I feel like they could've been more clean. This is me doing my best not to make the lines go all over the place. I also sketched the FX and lighting (done straight ahead). I've never done FX animation either so I went with my gut for this as well. Usually I would load up some japanese FX animation to give me an idea! I also threw in the pattern for the staff there and then I just used the transformation tool to track its placement.

4. Clean-up on FX and Lighting Pass

Yeah since I was going for a piece with lighting, I might as well do the shadows for this one. I don't think I did this right process-wise. So I just added some more animation stuff to the FX sketch pass.

5. Coloring

Pretty straight forward, just filling in the colors along with the spot blacks. What got me here was doing the pattern on the scarf. I had to go back and forth making sure that it looked at least decent when the patterns were moving. The patterns ended up a bit skewed but y'know "Finished, not perfect" haha! Somewhere along the process, I was thinking of doing a lineless style, but I chose not to.

6. Compositing

Ah, compositing, my favorite part. Don't be like me doing the background last, though. I pretty much tried to make the background fit the composition and colors. I also added a small touch of warping smoke at the background. 

This jump is pretty big compared to the previous step. It's a whole mess of fixing up the colors & lighting effects, working with the camera to create a semblance of depth, and prolonging the timing a bit. I also played around with post processing effects and blending modes for the glows--color dodge and blur for the win, baby! I also did some small keyframe animation for the intensity of the effects so they didn't come off as too strong.

So all-in-all, I think I'm pretty happy with how this turned out.  To be real honest, I did this project because I wanted to see how my style looked like animated. It was a very daunting when starting out (lighting?? FX?? animating patterns???) but I suppose with enough time and patience, it worked out!  

All this for an almost 3 second animation haha. Boy, is animation hard?