Responsive - 11 second club

I started working on 11 second club for this month. I decided to do it hand drawn as this would be a nice challenge and a good way to improve my fundamental animating skills.

I feel like hand drawn animation is also very versatile and can be used in a variety of ways and methods such as pose to pose or straight ahead or a combination of both, which is the ideal method for most cases in my opinion.

Hand drawn animation has always been my favorite medium for animating due to the reasons stated above. I am very inspired by Glen Keane's beautiful drawings, and how he can so convincingly bring characters to life using what could be referred to now as almost primitive tools of a pencil and paper.

I think that hand drawn animation is still very relevant today, although using the technique for feature films may not be a very cost effective method. I think that using hand drawn animation for character tests and for planning out the motion in some scenes, and using that work to set the groundings for the project, gives the project a very alive, active disposition. Exclusive to hand drawn animation.

What i mean by this is that setting the groundwork of the project with traditional animation but using, for example, CG for the final film, will give the film a vibrancy which is often associated with hand drawn animation.

An example of this can be found with films such as 'Frozen' and 'Moana' which used traditional animation for character tests in the early stages to set the groundwork and get a feel for the project before animating in a more restricted medium.

Frozen:

 Moana:

overall i think that using traditional hand drawn animation provides a good medium for learning, as  in my opinion, there is no medium more raw, more open than hand drawn animation. In this way it is the simplest medium but also the most challenging.

To begin the project i downloaded the audio from the 11 second club website, listened to it alot of times and then started thinking of some ideas for characters.

I always struggle with designing characters but i tried to think about what the characters in the audio clip are saying and what sort of character would say those things. I then began to visualize those ideas in my sketchbook and develop them until i was happy with the way they looked and the visual character matched up to the character in the audio.

 I tried to keep my characters simple and used simple geometric shapes to construct them.

I decided to have the focus primarily on the character animation and so the scene is quite empty but the objective of this brief is character animation so the other parts of the animation are less important.

To make sure the frames synced up with the audio, i used premier to map the frames to the audio. I created a makeshift dope sheet in the back of my sketchbook for reference when animating. This is a technique commonly used in the industry, especially in animation for TV shows.

 My dopesheet is kept very simple but some dope sheets can get very complicated when there are a lot of elements to a scene that need to be organized. Below is an example of this:

  I kept the composition very simple for my scene and had a very basic composition structure of each character at an opposite end of the scene.

When animating, i tried a slightly different approach to my normal method of hand drawn animation. I added alot more keys and much less inbetweens, so it was more fluid and vibrant movements. This is edging more towards the straight ahead method but still implementing the key poses but just with less inbetweens. I decided to use this approach because in the past when animating pose to pose i would make too little key poses and loads of inbetweens between keys so i would just have very boring, inorganic movements.

To help with some of the movements and to help keep the movements and expressions looking organic, professional animators use video reference of themselves acting out the scenes before animating. I think its good to use reference to help build up a better visual library and for this reason using reference can help to improve the animators skills when not using reference.

The wrong way of using reference in my opinion is to copy it meticulously, at no point should the animator copy reference. For one the animator does not learn anything out of it or only learns a minimal amount and also the animation will feel lifeless. It is sometimes necessary to exaggerate further than what is acted out on the reference, the reference is just something to go off, more of a starting point. 

I used reference of myself and max pulling the expressions and acting out bits of the dialogue. I didnt use the reference constantly but it really helped me when i was struggling with expressions and hand movements.