IOL Week 6

IOL WEEK 6 - YouTube

Aim

Using animation software to make 2d animation defines alot of my usual process. Using ToonBoom allows you to easily manipulate framerates, timings, and every line you draw. I wanted to see what I would learn about 2D animation if I animated on paper instead, so this week I did pencil animation tests instead. 

Method

I cut up a bunch of A4 printer paper in halves and got reference footage of a crying scene, because I haven't really animated a scene focusing on facial expressions yet.

I tried just watching the video, pausing and drawing frames to get a rough idea but this wasn't very effective on its own. I did a lot of sketching and drawing thumbnails of the footage to breakdown the movements which were occuring. 

I did two animation tests in a realistic style trying to use this footage as my main reference. The first one I did very fast as a kind of study, the second one I did with more detail of the character. However, I wasn't satisfied with where it was going, soo I made a third attempt with a more stylistic approach.

In my third attempt I used the footage less and first broke down the head an body movements into simple shapes, before drawing the expression and more details. 

Result

I haven't ever really animated with paper before, so I found I was learning alot about the way the physicality of the paper influences the animation process. For instance, I didn't realise that realistically you would only be flipping through 2 to 3 frames at a time (as oppsoed to digitally being able to loop through a bunch very easily). This meant I had to focus more on what I was doing with each frame, and know what purpose they served in the overall animation.I think my final animation has some tweeening issues in some movements, but I liked what I made overall. I think my early tests may not appear to be that helpful on their own, but I found doing these 'study' excercises very useful and overall I think this is a very practical way to begin getting a deeper understanding of movement, how to plan it and how a lot of the principles I have been learning weave together in practice. I think working with paper can also be a very fast way to create more iterations fro me, as digital software allows you to be more of a perfectionist at times.