Week 5 More animation tests, developing a style. Learning from Will Kim

My way of dealing with depression is just to immerse myself in work and try to keep myself busy

More Animation Tests 
This week I have been carrying out animation tests and developing the style. .  My original decision was to use water-colour paper, but when I was doing the calculations I realised that this would be too expensive.  I did a 2 second animation that was 6 frames a second and that cost me £5 in water colour paper.  therefore, at 12 frames per second, this would be twice the price. £5 for 1 second and £10 for 2 seconds. My animation was going to be 90 seconds long, so it would have been 90 x £5, equalling £450. I therefore had to revise this to make my production affordable, so I switched to a digital production, which would be much less expensive.

Developing a style
For the actual animation test, I used the rotaocopes that I prepared earlier.  I traced these onto water-colour paper and then I coloured each frame in with water-colours.  I used Dragon Frame software and a Rostrum camera to capture each painting. However,  I have not used this software or set up since first year, and this lack of recent experience meant that the test came out yellow because of lighting and camera set up and generally being unfamiliar with the software. I corrected this, using Adobe Premier Pro.  In this process, I stumbled upon a new and interesting colour scheme which I like very much and am considering using as a colour pallet to enhance the narrative.

Learning from Will Kim
I emailed Will Kim. Who suggested I take his skillshare class. So i did.

He uses quite simple shapes. Focusing on the more illustration side of thing. He gathers sketches and brainstorms from observational drawings and then, using limited animation puts them together by first animating the character layer separately to the background layer. By utilising loops, he saves time in his animating process. Once the initial traditional animation is done, he goes in and uses watercolour to colour each frame. That’s how he achieves the flickering effect.

He then scans everything in. He channels out the layers in photoshop. To do this he goes to the actions tav in photoshop and clicks new action (next to the bin icon) This then records your actions so that they can be easily repeated. Once your done, click the stop button. Save these off as PNG’s

Create a couple of folders in the project panel

Import the files

The go to preferences > Import to change the default duration of each frame. He changed it to 0:00:00:04

He kept the frame rate as 29.7

He then dragged all the black and white files into the timeline. To make the background loop he duplicated the frames multiple times and then sequences them.

Rinse and repeat as needed for each composition as needed.

Do the same process for the watercolour textures

Change layer mode to stencil alpha

Scan in watercolour paper, use as background texture.

What I took away from his class?

Some of his methods are applicable to my final film. I like how he used the alpha channel tool to speed up the process of creating all those masks. It is a tool I’ve never used before, but always wondered about. This will come in handy when editing things in the future. It was also interesting to find out about the stencil alpha tool in aftereffects.