Tag: animation

Not sure how this project got started. I wanted to experiment with objects interacting with each other and with having multiple animations happening at once. With clutter, basically. The most impressive animations I’ve ever seen have always dealt with clutter—lots of little moving parts all smashing together, like the teddy bear hallucination in Akira or the dream parade of junk in Paprika. Somehow this line of thinking led to a moose.

So much of animation happens in a void, especially when you’re doing it all on your own. A lot of amateur animation, including my own, involves one thing placed on an empty plane. The character or object I’m animating takes so much priority that the background or the actual environment it’s been placed in takes a back seat.

Having nothing but an empty void, logic tries to force itself into the situation. How does a moose end up here? Well lets have it come out of a pipe. Where does it go? Well lets have a portal of some kind. And where’s that portal going to come from? Another moose from the pile of mooses?

(I still can’t believe mooses isn’t a word. “A pile of fish” sounds good, makes sense. “A pile of moose” sounds so weird and I just can’t get behind it! Is it because it’s probably more common to see just one moose on its own instead of a whole bunch of moose together? [Now, see right there it kind of sounded alright… maybe I’m coming around to it.])

Animating a moose is hard. I’m never going to draw another one again. I’m not satisfied with a few of the movements I’ve done—especially the walk cycle. Their weird little inverted back legs throw me off. And their antlers are these big massive scoops that I’ve screwed up 50% of the time. The main moose spends half the video looking more like a deer.

That being said, I’m proud of the finished clip!

The most time consuming sequences were the shortest bits: the pile of mooses, the office workers running away. I lost my mind at times, but it’s so satisfying to watch them now. Then all of those earlier elements I wanted to experiment with accumulating in the final moose drop from the ceiling, smashing the desk. From an empty void to a full background. Multiple layers of animation interacting with each other.

Another day, another animation project. Actually, it’s more like “another few months” as these things take time! And I work on them on and off, not at all consistently. They’re like long-term sketch pads for little doodles, eventually coming together in some way or another. I get an idea and play with it, then another idea comes along and I play with it, and try to string everything together in a way that can be showcased. They’re drawing lessons more than anything.

I treated this one more like a sketchpad than anything else and decided to keep it that way. It all started with this painting at the Tate. It isn’t much to write home about—it’s very dark and murky and kept in an even darker and murkier room—but for some reason it caught my eye and wanted to use it as the basis for an animation project.

I thought the woman in the painting would make for a great animation mostly because her dress covers up nearly all of her body, which would be forgiving enough for animating. After biting off a bit more than I could chew on my last project, I was more non-committal with this one. I kept the rough pencil lines unpolished and the layers uncomplicated so I could focus on just the animation and letting it go where it wanted to go. Sometimes the coloring and cleaning-up lines can take longer than nailing down the actual flow of the animation. Actually, they always take longer.

Cut to my morning routine: swinging through the Waitrose self-checkout queue with whatever I’ve grabbed for breakfast before work, squeezing through the pure concentrated capitalism of fifty self-checkout machines all talking over each other in that insane, disembodied, sub-human voice. I was really struck by the wall of sound one morning and spent the next few days making different recordings of it, holding up my phone and little microphone trying not to look completely out-of-step with all the other 9 to 5ers.

I became obsessed with the different self-checkout voices. I went into deeply weird corners of YouTube to find clearer sound samples. I read about the voice actors who get hired to provide the voices—they remain anonymous because of course. At this point, all I had in terms of the animation was this woman from the painting that I had been playing around with, and now these sound recordings, nothing else. Absolutely no through line, just two things that I had been struck by recently, so I combined them in honestly the most literal, unimaginative way possible: turn the woman into a self-checkout machine! Obviously! And honestly, everything else that happens in the animation is the natural course of events.

Oh boy, here’s a big one. I would say I have advanced in my understanding of TVPaint, meaning I’ve learned a few things but I’ve still got an eternally long way to go before I know all the ins and outs. This project started out with one goal and then spiralled into a whole host of other experiments and now here we are with whatever this is. At the start of everything, I didn’t care for a story necessarily, I just wanted to have as detailed and clean a sequence as possible. I wanted to avoid line jitter, I wanted the movement to be smooth and believable, I wanted the sequence to look interesting, with lots of moving pieces. I love animation where the entire screen is filled with movement, not going fast or all over the place, but with smooth, seamless movement.

On this, I grade myself a… pat on the back.

I mean, I am proud of myself. This is the most complex project I’ve done on TVPaint so far—there are sequences here (the clothes coming together, the makeup, the burger) that took weeks to do. But when I watch it back, I see all the areas for improvement: The shadows could be more logical, the human figure gets a little wobbly here and there and lacks a sense of solidity. BUT, I also love it. I’m particularly proud of the tomatoes. And the hair.

My first thought was burgers

I wanted an interesting animation with detail and movement, so my mind went to a cheeseburger. Maybe I was just really hungry, but I thought about all the different shapes and colors that it would require and went with it.

I did a little test animation of a pair of hands unwrapping a burger and liked how it turned out. This test one was rotoscoped, technically, which I guess is kind of looked down on in animation the same way tracing would be looked down on in a drawing. I used the main poses from this animation in my final animation, but shortened the movement and added some changes to the drawing to make it feel closer to animation than rotoscope.

Once I had my burger down, I moved on to other things that could interact with it. Hands were one, but I didn’t want to commit to doing a human figure and the complexity that would add, so I did one but covered most of it in a big dress, and had it spend half its time as a blob. You can’t go wrong with blobs. Make your blob a balloon and you have sophistication!

Balloons, burger, repeat

Everything in the final version has at least 1 additional version as a sketch. I worked out the movements at the sketch level, then went over those frames with clean lines. At the beginning, I was naive enough to think I could maybe do just the keyframes as sketches, go over them with lines, and figure out the inbetweens at the clean line level. Anytime there’s an awkward bit in the final sequence it’s because I was lazy and didn’t work out my sketch first! Lesson learned.

Once the lines are down, coloring in TVPaint is a breeze (but sometimes not!). The software also has an automatic shadow/cell shading function, but I’ve never been completely pleased with it, so I did my own manually, which was often mind-numbing. Backgrounds were relatively simple and only required a few tricky experiments to nail down the zooms and pans.

I didn’t mean for any of this to happen, really. I just wanted a fun little project to tryout some techniques and ended up with this behemoth (relative behemoth, OK). The final sequence is just a chain reaction from blob to human, to hair and makeup, and what better way to wrap it all up than literally wrapping it all up in paper in the end.

Processes, processes. I’m always tinkering with something. It’s usually something needlessly gargantuan that sees little payoff outside of the actual process of doing the thing—which is kind of the perfect description for knitting. Big workload, small and meticulous results. Just-shy-of-worried looks from people when I tell them about the project.

I’m supposed to be teaching myself how to knit a sweater. That’s the ultimate goal and when I finally get around to it and make the subsequent tutorial about it for my YouTube channel, then I think I will retire from everything. Or just poof into dust. But it’s summer (April, actually, fake-summer) and I’m procrastinating knitting with even more ridiculous hobbies such as… whatever this thing is:

That’s an animation of my living room magically cleaning itself up?

I spent an embarrassing sum of money on professional 2D animation software from a company called TVPaint based out of France. I had to let a French guy (Frenchman? Frenchman) ghost onto my computer in order to get it all installed, which was not the first or the last time I wondered if the purchase was the best use of my time and money (what money, actually?).

It’s the equivalent of a dad’s tool shed out back. A workbench in the garage. 1990s tinkertime. But instead of fixing a sink or building a something-or-other (what are dads [or moms, OK] building these days?), I’m drawing the same thing over and over and over again at 24, sometimes 48, frames a second. It’s terribly addictive. I’ve always loved animation and 2D, hand drawn animation has always been what I admire the most. I’ve experimented with plenty of stop motion (see: my wacky intros for my older knitting videos) but never found the perfect software for 2D. I had heard about TVPaint and it was always a temptation in the periphery. Until now!

Well the work is slow. The software has an interface kind of like Photoshop in terms of layers, but it has a level of intuitiveness that is bonkers. I’ll be wanting to do something complicated with a particular sequence and TVPaint will just know exactly what I need to do and will do it for me. It’s addictive and the end result is… well, what is the end result?

Here’s another animation. This was mainly a test of my walk cycle skills and once I nailed that, I didn’t want to just have a walk cycle, so I put him on a treadmill and sort of cycle-through-the-seasons thing.

Has a bit of a bleak end to it, but all pedestrian ideas do. My next project involves a cheeseburger. You’ll see it in probably 10 years judging by the rate I’m working at. And the view counts are below 100 because I keep these on a channel separate from my knitting so as not to confuse what I should be working on with what I’m actually working on.