I promised I would write about the making of the piece of animation where I showed Hestia thinking about going over to Ezekial. And now it is finished I will do just that.
When I started Morgan was firm with me that I start animating on layers. That it would save me a lot of time not having to draw the whole thing over and over again. Knowing I was pressed for time, I acquiesced.
I made three master keys based on my storyboard, I went through the process I’m getting used to by now, Proto-keys, messy keys, and finally something worth looking at. I also made some semi-keys/inbetweens that would be cleaner and thus easier to trace off of.
That done I got to work making layers.I figured out what would be in front of Hestia and what would be behind her and made separate layers for both those things. Her shield and some blades of grass in front and on one layer, and more grass, the horizon, the stars and the tail end of her dress on the background layer. Once I had this going I copied both out twice so both would be on a boil line, taking notes from earlier https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/152561916/posts/134 and evolving the process, I would now have both real time animation and boil lines going at the same time. How’s that for layered animation!?
But That still left most of Hestia on the main layer of animation, and she would have to be fully animated. My use of the boil line had only saved me so much work. This wasing to be very hard.
The scene had Hestia looking into the distance (Ata an off-screen Ezekiel) looking sad and concerned. She raises one arm up, letting the other flop down, looks at her hand in uncertainty, looks away thoughtfully, makes a decision and steels herself, straightens up and begins to smile with hope, and then lets her arms down into a position of easy and openness, ready to give Ezekiel an embrace.
It might sound simple. But I’m showing off a thinking process and a lot of emotions just using pose, body movement, and facial expressions. That’s a plan of planning to do and act out.
The whole thing would take at least 6 seconds. More drawn animation than I have ever done for a single shot.
As if that wasn’t enough this would require me to draw faces and expressions constantly. Two things I am terrible at. But I vowed I would give my all. Plus This was a change to improve on a mistake I made years ago.
When I made my first animation I broke a big rule I didn’t know about. You should never have a major change in facial expression when a character is moving a lot. It makes the change impossible to read. Not knowing this I ruined an important moment of a character deciding a ghost he is looking at is just brought on by drink by having all change from fear to mirth happen while his head was moving. I would fix this mistake. This time my expression changes would read clearly!
I knew I couldn’t do this on straight ahead animation. Not when this would require at least 46 drawings.i would have to do this pose-to-pose. I went to the library and reread a chunk of Richard Williams “The Animator’s Survival Kit”. I re-learned quite a few things I’d forgotten. Extremes, downs, and passing-positions where all things I had forgotten about. In my mind anything that was not a Key was an Inbetween.
I took all of this back to heart and got to work I made my Extremes first. As knew from earlier in the course that if you don’t show the parts of the movement people need to see then it will look like the subject skips in a flat line from A to C, missing that B section that makes the movement right instead of wrong. I mentioned this problem in this journal https://johnhawk.art.blog/2018/10/26/looping-multi-media-animation/ Stating that in my small piece of classical animation the spacing was all wrong. So yes. The extremes had to come first,
I chose to just focus on the first two seconds of footage first. The space between the first two keys. With my extremes done I then did my passing positions (Thought sometimes they were one and the same thing) as the piece cannot work without them and having these halfway points would make inbetweening way easier. I then did any downs or ups I could find, acting out the motions myself time and again. I then did some extra ones for things like changes in facial expression. With ALL of that done I now found I had few inbetweens to do considering I was still animation on threes. All I had to do was decide where to put them so the timing would be right.
The Inbetweens seemed easy. Fun almost. But when they were done I was only half way to the second Key out of three.
What happened next is mostly a blank. But I went through this process three more times. A full two weeks of work. Even improvising a bit where Hestia’s eyes dart from one corner to another that I really like. Also adding in blink that was unplanned. I looked forward to reaching the final Key. Not because it meant the end, there was another 2 seconds of footage after that. But because I felt I could do all of that in straight-ahead animation, which I did, and it felt like a holiday in comparison. But the animation on that last bit wasn’t quite as good. All I had to do was wait for Morgan to set up the Lightbox.
But he was very busy and I wasn’t always awake when he was free. So in the meantime I moved onto the next bit. Hestia moving forward to give Eziekal his embrace. No sooner did I finish drawing the Key than I panicked. Not only was she walking. But she was walking forwards at a diagonal angle. Something I had no idea how to do. The small bits of walking animation I had done had always been them walking along a 2D plane. But I’d made my bed and decided to go for it. It was only a second and a half long.
This involving scaling along with everything else that makes a walk cycle hard I went totally pose-to-pose. Nothing left to chance. It was some of the most rigid and methodical animation work I had ever done. But it also meant I would have to redraw Hestia everytime. Meaning the animation would have a lot of life and movement to it by default.
It turns out that walks with a character at a three-quarters angle like this are one of the hardest things a 2D animator can do. Morgan, Tom and Owen have all said this to me. Once again I had jumped into the artistic deep end without even considering if what I was doing was normal for people of my level. And once again it worked out okay for me.
When Morgan was available he set up the light box for me. He was a little cross that I had done the whole thing. He’d wanted me to make a line test first. I promised I Would do one next time if he’d help me (A promise I kept. But that’s another story).
We put the different layers down. I actually found I had to put the top layer underneath the image of Hestia. She became too blurry otherwise. Morgan left me to film it and I got to work. Taking a shot, removing the old drawing, changing the boil lines, adding the new drawing, over and over again. I felt physically sick with nerves. If this turned out awful I’d want to kill myself. But when it was all done it was okay. Not great. But still the best animation I’ve ever done. Truthfully it feels like the only piece of real animation I’ve ever done.
Here’s Hestia thinking
(Pease go fullscreen the video quality isn’t great)
And here’s her walking towards Ezekial.
Ezekiel is on a boil. He doesn’t need to move here. I put him on the top layer because even though Hestia is moving and he isn’t it would feel wrong if she was in focus when he is nearer.
And there you go. 3 weeks work. The hardest animation work I’ve ever done. I hope it was worth it.
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