Animating

The animation schedule started as every Monday and Wednesday after school and any study period I had that I could free up. I had watched a lot of Youtube animatic videos and tutorials on animation and was feeling more confident after a couple trial runs.

I used Procreate as my platform for the 2d animation. I did try Krita and Clip Studio Paint as they are professional animation softwares, but I wasn't too familiar with their interface and animating process. It was also draining my computer battery significantly.

Other than that, because I didn't have a drawing tablet that could connect to my laptop, it became extremely difficult to draw using the keypad of my laptop.

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After that, there were a couple types of animating I had to do.

The first was rotoscope animation. This method was mainly used in the opening sequence as I had filmed it completely with the intention of wanting more movement and energy. I had used a blue pencil brush as line art. Outlining the rough shapes of the hands and the pen. I wasn't too concerned with precision as I liked the messy look, it felt more painterly. Afterwards, I would have to make a separate layer to do the colouring and grouped them together.

I realised when sketching, I liked the onion skin opacity to be increased so I could imagine how it would flow, whilst when colouring, the onion skin opacity would be lowered so I could focus on one specific frame and where the line art was. This specific shot took a lot of time as I had to key in painting + cut out parts of the painting so the yellow paint bottle and palette looked as if they overlapped it.

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The second was with reference, but freehand animation. Especially for the speaking bits, I would film myself in the angle that I wanted and use it as reference for mouth movement and micro-expressions. How I did that was pause every 0.2s or so and use that as one frame. Then I would just duplicate Gary and alter his facial expressions accordingly.

For this shot, there was a lot of trial and error to get the timing right. I had used the hold frame option a lot to perfect the timing. Holding frames like the sighs for up to 5 or 6 frames more to really exaggerate the emotion.

Although, I always encountered the problem of needing too many frames/layers and it caused problems. I ended up having to split the shot into multiple files just to be able to do all the animation.

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Whilst this one shot's process wasn't too different from the one above it, it was slightly different. I wanted Gary to become more and more opaque as he entered the office. I went back on each layer, select where Gary had entered the office and changed the opacity of the line art and the colouring.

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The animating process alone took me a bit more than a month to finish.

When duplicating the files, I would have to label a certain frame and that would be the cut off point. So I would delete files above the labelled one in the duplicated file. Being a tedious process, I did have a few animation files where I accidentally deleted the ones below the labelled frame in the copied file. Meaning I had to redo the whole animation again.

To prevent that from happening again, I named each file 1, 1.5 and 2, so I was reminded to always delete above the labelled frame. The names would also make it easier when exporting and editing.