Helloooooo everypony!
Lionheart
doing this post and I thought I'd show a progression as well as a little proof
the project's going forward ;)
Today's
shot was the Plaza… and here it is in it's infancy. The first image ideas I drafted at the time and added to the
timeline to make sure the progression of the action was consistent and flowed
well with what was before. At that
point we have listened to the song a lot of times.. A-LOT-OF-TIMES. Had we gotten tired of it we probably would
have known at this point that we didn’t have something good either visually or
in terms of audio for what we were doing.
Luckily for
us, everything was honky dory and the imagery that kept coming to mind spoke
for itself, so I went ahead and linearted the sequence in animation, directly
in flash, again to make sure it flowed AND to use as a template later for
animating full-resolution. Had I done
this just before the actual animation I would have had troubles detecting
possible problems. Animation is about
testing and testing and testing again to see every little flaws. And even then,
you may not see them all. So the sooner
the first test draft is done, the more time you have to foresee problems ;)
Of course,
before any real layout work is done, the animatic has to be completed so once
it was, I set forward to use the designs of the town and render a full-size
layout line-art and ready-to-paint background image. This is where knowledge of perspective and balance are needed. Even with a working draft BG, there are
major corrections to do in terms of perspective. And it has to be: otherwise the character won't be evolving in a
solid background and will look wonky.
This meant a lot of back and forth.. communication between me and Spirit
was crucial to make sure we both liked what was being done, that the
composition was working and that we always had a fresh eye on the production.
So when
that's done, it's a good step forward!
Animating
is what takes the longest time. Some
hate and rue Flash's tweening process.. and I would agree most of the
time. See, the Tweening is an
estimation of how something moves..as well as a straight line between the two
keyframes. So sometime's it's right but for my purposes it's usually wrong and
makes a lot of stuff look robotic. I
got myself a little plugin to make the ease-in and ease-out automatically which
helps a lot and upon which I can add extra keyframes to reduce the 'blockiness'
of the animation.
Luna being
a quadruped… which I happen to have quite an easy time animating.. doesn’t make
matters easy thanks to Flash's un-intuitive nature. Drawing a character in perspective is one thing… constructing it
out of symbols with a hierarchy is another.
BUT it pays off in the end as the character is always on model AND can
be re-used later more easily than a drawing.
Once I
spent the better part of a 24h period animating a few seconds of animation,
it's off to after effects where it all comes together. This is where I get to see the fruits of my
labor look more and more part of the scene we intended for it. Color adjustment, lighting, extra shadows
and shades, background anims and special effetcs are all done in there. Not one shot of the project will escape from
this place ;) All that's left after
that is to render the composite images and import in Adobe Premiere where I see
if the timing from flash to final was lost or has to be tweaked. Many times I saw mistakes in Premiere as
some effects bring up defects or the previous and following shots highlight a
problem in that new shot.
Whew.. so
there you have it! How things are being
done, how it is and will be for what's left of the project, one shot at a time
:)
I hope you like it as much as I do :)
-Lionheartcartoon