Forums → Art, Music, and Writing → Animation thread
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Hello again, community.
I haven't seen a thread regarding animations here, sorry if it has been made before.
I figured it would be nice to have a place to post animations, so here goes. Of course they need to be made by you, not stolen somewhere off of the interweb.
Hmm, if there's enough animators on here, we could make a contest...
I'll go first, posting the first real animation I've done. It's composed of 21 frames (looping in a way that doesn't really make sense, because I was too lazy), each frame drawn in Photoshop, then opened in the GIMP and exported as a .gif.
I tried to get a sense of how velocity works...
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these are just two simple animations i made a pretty long time ago using paint and benton gif animator...
@ Zophia:
Wow, the level of detail you've attempted to capture for your first FBF animation is ambitious. And parts of it look really good.
I remember the first time I tried doing FBF (before I had a tablet, so drawing solely on scrapbook paper) I constantly had to readjust and redraw individual frames after I had scanned them in. It wasn't very cool. Lemme see if I have the first attempt I ever did...with a lot of adjustments...
OMG EPIC MEDIOCRITY
The drawing part was really simple, but the animating bit took ages, really ages and as you can see there are places it doesn't really flow. Even in subsequent attempts the biggest issue are minor postural adjustments, because unless you can see the frame you drew before in its actual context in the animation, chances are you'll be off. In Zophia's case, this is seen in the hands and the tail.
If you can afford it, I would recommend something like Plastic Animation Paper (PAP), which allows you to animate like in a lightbox, and makes keeping track of your frames a lot easier. Well that would be if you bothered paying for something other than the free version...which I'm too poor to do!
An example would be this (and I've posted this before but just for the sake of demonstration):
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Anyway. Zophia, that's really good for your first attempt (better than mine lol), particularly your command of figure and angle. Postural dynamism is also really good, which basically means you've got the talent to be an excellent animator.
I can remember what I was thinking about for future improvement when I started and now (because I'm still not experienced in animation), so in a list:
* Play with the framerate. 10fps is really too slow. If you can get something up to 20fps it looks a lot smoother even if a little fast.
* Velocity is probably the hardest thing to get, imo (aside from dubbing and gradual expression changes). Actions and motions don't necessarily flow on (I struggle with this)- so it's normal for something to seem like you're "jumping" or moving "too quickly" while drawing the frames. In fact you could experiment with removing one or two of the frames in your animation and see what it looks like then (this would also help the issue of the wayward arms and possibly the tail.)
It sounds paradoxical but sometimes exaggeration leads to greater realism.
In this particular example, when the character pushes their arms back, they should shoot forward just a little more- I assume that's the idea, yes? I mean...it'd be really hard to correct that given the frames you've drawn (unless you redraw them) but you get the idea, yeah?
I would definitely be up for an animation competition but we'd have to sort out some kind of rules. Heck, if it takes off we could possibly invite larger scale submissions and competitions!