July Snapshot #5: : 'Predator & Prey' Post-Mortem

Greetings everyone!

As is tradition I wanted to cover a little bit about this weeks animation and some thoughts in post-production. So lets talk about the aims here:

1. I wanted to focus on a simple smaller scale project to experiment with various animating techniques.

2. I wanted to shoot on 1s to see how the flow would feel.

3. Finally I wanted to take advantage of some color work.

I decided to opt for one of my prototype projects since that's ideally what they were meant for. I'm not a fan of 'reworking' an older submission especially since the surprise impact will be lessened but I did want to use my free time to explore what this would look like shooting on ones (meaning that I would draw every frame in a 24 frame per second sequence.)

The challenges I faced were definitely present, one being how much time it took to clean up the cels from the drafted versions of the prototype. It actually took me longer to clean them up to a presentable state then it would have been redrawing them from scratch (theoretically). This led to a knock on effect of making inbetweening a laborious task since I had to in-between cels that were not properly cleaned up leading to lots of error corrections. That said I decided to keep the flow in accordance to the original cels.

Once I finished cleaning up the line work I wanted to try a monochromatic approach to the color palette, something akin to a blue-silver tone and use variants to get the right distinctions for the characters. This process was made much easier when I realized I could convert all pixel data for each later to a specific selected color so processing this was a breeze, filling in the cels was really the only busy bit of this task so I was quite pleased with that result.

Overall I'm fairly content with the animation, its very smooth so that's a big plus, something that I would have expected for an animation shot on ones anyways but its always magical to see it come together. 

From what I've gathered:

1. Ensuring roughed sketches is a must for quicker clean up work, it just makes communicating where the lines should be much more comprehensive.

2. Monochromatic color schemes worked so well I decided to incorporate that as a format for future projects!

3. While shooting on 1s is very flowy and exceptionally soft on the eyes, shooting on 2s will get the job sufficiently done. I will occasionally shoot segments of animation on 1s if the readability improves by it and, all things considered, its a format is something I'd like to use more often in the future with other artists assisting.

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As a final side note, I decided to throw up screen shots of earlier work from this project in addition to some sneak peeks at the new line up of animations in production right now!

I think I've written enough for the time being, I'll catch you all next Wednesday for the open studio postings!