All images and videos copyright Timothy Merks 2020
Well here's a line test for this shot. I'll update my progress as I go.
Here's the original line drawings and how I decided to animate "Porcelain". I thought if I divided up my page like this I could do my pencil animation faster as it meant I couldn't add in too much detail and with this film. You'll also see that I don't trace the previous frame. Occasionally on some shots I did trace but most of the time I just guesstimated in the box this was because I wanted the film to have a sort of hand held look.
My original drawings (which are very rough and loose) were cleaned up by Roseline to keep it reasonably on model. Not so much of an issue for the LB character but very important for the Doll character since the women I draw don't look that pretty.
Ok you'll notice between videos I controlled the line a bit better and made the hair and the collar animate secondary to the body movement. (Well that's the idea I'm not sure if I've got this working yet). I also bumped around the images and lined them up better than the first set. I wanted to show this version before I inbetweened it so you can compare the original keys to the finished keys.
FINALLY I'm uploading the inbetweened animation (blogger kept crashing on me). Ok well a little bit more about this shot is that it happens after LB is waiting at the lights and as this shot progresses the camera looks up towards the building he works at. So yet to come is the background and a few extra characters to fill out the shot.
You'll notice the last few frames aren't animated and he's just sliding that is because the camera will have left him by then. An important thing to learn when there's only you animating it is knowing when not to animate. I've been watching a great piece of animation called "Trava Fist Planet" and that guy (Takeshi Koike) can really animate but he also knows when to do holds and he even has jump cuts within the same shot. He just throws on a popping sound effect to cover the jump. I've seen this done in film before but it works just as well for animation.
When inbetweening I try to just do one inbetween between my keys first to double check my movement and the positions. That last part of LBs walk I really had to move around till I was happy with it. Also I find that if I just work to straight ahead I get fatigued by the end of the shot. So spreading out the drawings and not working too linearly I can keep a good energy throughout the shot. I also take this approach in making a film that I work on the intro then the epilogue and then pick the major scenes to do and now what I'm doing at the moment are the inbetween scenes to tie it together.
How I approach my timing for my animation is that I listen for the movements. Like what sound it would make. If you look at that opening fight in my showreel you'll hear this heavy whooshing sound (underneath all the yelling) this is that sound I listen for when doing my timing. Trusting your ears is a lot better than you eyes or trying to approach it too logically. It's like doing lip sync, If you get the character to lip every letter of the word it will look stupid you only do the mouth shapes for what sound you hear.
Ok like I said there are a few more things to throw at this shot. I'll update when they are done.
7/12/08 7:10pm
So Rose and I went to the Tasmanian beer festival this weekend. We caught up with some of our work friends there. After we tried some beers we decided the next best thing to do was to go and get a good steak. All was going well until ... well this:
I'll have to see tomorrow who survived but Rose and I are ok.
Rose has even found some time to draw some pretty sweet new pictures. Check them out
So Rose helped me out with this one. Based on a dream I had.
Here's some stills from the video to combat the possible loss with the blogger video
/merks-art/2008/10/halloween-video.html
So Rose and I woke up last night to some noise in our dining room and we came across some escapees from Rose's head.
So here's the finished shot. Pretty good considering nothing is actually animated, it's all just moving stills. To get the cars to move across without looking crappy you jitter the up and down in their movement path. You'll notice a bit of parralax movement at the start (where some layers are moving in different directions and speeds to other layers) and there's a bit of a pull focus that also happens. These little tricks can make a 4second still image a slight bit more interesting.
Oh if you're wondering why I didnt keep the warmer city image and chose the washed out one for the final, it's more about what emotion that will give my sequence. There's not a lot of dialouge in "Porcelain" so the imagery has to be clear on the feeling. This is the stuff you can only do on your own projects and never for any clients.
(no filter)
(blurs)
So now it is all in photoshop (the other stuff was in flash). I adjusted the curves on the background to nice it up a bit.
Ok the background characters are now all in. Have to export them at various layers. I had to expand up a bit because I think I'll crane down to all the people waiting. You'll notice the far background characters have no outlines. They will probably have a heavy blur on them.
Ok you'll notice I pulled the saturation down on that last image. That was just testing the colours a bit. Here's the raw image moved along a bit. 3 new characters and I just mapped out the further background characters. I need to do a background and a foreground.
Here's an hours work. I'll update this post as the shot progresses
Tasmania is a great fun place to go exploring. We came across some interesting parks, funny old houses, lots of different cats and we even spotted someone doing a nice piece of street art under a bridge.
Well when we left Dome we headed for Salamanca to do a little bit of shopping at the markets. We took a little detour because Roseline had spotted some ducklings the week before and forgot to take along our camera. So we went to see if they were still there to get a photo.
If the photo was a bit wider you would see all the coke bottles and other parts of rubbish that they swim in. You would think they'd clean up after themselves.
Well there is something a little under half done that I had been working on. I hope to finish that soon. I did finish one piece of creativity this week. I think I did this on Monday
3 of the books I bought were of the Groundwork series. These I fully recommend these to all animators out there as it contains a lot of the key animation drawings with all the timings penciled in on the side. Excellent for reference! Check the bottom part of that image of the large crowd drawing. There are 4 or 5 pages of that!! MADNESS
The second is a conceptual design from a project I'm doing with Jamie. It's one of the reasons all these images are photos because I used this blue pastel pencil and I have no fixative at the moment and I really didn't want that all over my scanner. I'll leave the project unnamed for the moment some of you already know what it is but we're planning to do something quite diverse and instead of creating one thing we'd create a world on multiple platforms. Ambitious and still at its baby stages but it should be pretty awesome.
Well this originally started out as some production art for "A relaxing Sunday" but turned into a drawing women exercise. I still haven't quite got an interesting female character style yet but its a long working progress.
I'm back living it up large in Hobart! Rose and I did heaps of cool stuff done on the trip over, when we get some time we will post it up between our blogs.
I drew this one and inked it over the last few weeks. Because of this I was inking with different pens and I was inking in different sorts of styles. Also inking on the train is very hard to do nice lines. I worked out that I could do the sketchy lines when the train was moving and when we arrived at a station I'd try to do the nicer lines.
I do like my designs though. Actually the Crabbot pilots look the best in the last few panels they star in. They evolved with the comic. Red Beards 'beard' was a pain to draw. Joker was a lot of fun but I wish i remembered to keep him skinny. I also wish I kept Falcon's arm bandages but then I think that would have taken more time to draw.Khan suffers a bit of bad art due to me racing to get over the line and not really having the time to develop him. I liked where I was heading with him but not quite there. Steve cracked me up. I wish I kept those little eyes but I forgot. I'm glad I inked his scene with the boys.
Ok well enough of me talking about it,
Also check out my friends comics
Jamie Anderson's - "So now I hate the moon"
Tim Cannan's - "Poo-lock Holems"
Now sleep ... sleep is needed
Before starting I have organised all my tools and cleaned up my desks. Here's my light table all decked out.
Ok so at 3:45pm I have planned out my whole story. It will be titled 'Skulls and Daggers'. It's a war, comedy and a scifi comic. That blank page in the middle is something I need to be filling in.
