I recently delved into the world of hand-drawn comics-style animation, after a lifetime of just sketching on paper. While I have a long experience with video editing, I had no experience with video animation of that kind. When I first got the idea to do the video it felt like a mountain to me, excessively complex. But the steep learning curve got easier with time. This is my top-5 cheat list to get you up and running.
The finalized video is my tribute to philosopher, indie artist, and fellow sci-fi junkie, John Maus: an unofficial music video for his track “Quantum Leap”. Tools used during the two months of production: A Wacom tablet, Photoshop (The Gimp would work fine too), Sony Vegas Pro (compositing), After Effects (for the lazers in the final battle only).
1. Don’t draw everything
This project would still be in its infancy now if I had to also draw the backgrounds (and it would look worse too). This is where the beauty of Creative Commons came in, all the backgrounds in the various scenes are licensed under the “Attribution” license. The space pictures are from NASA. Only a single scene in the whole video is fully drawn (the one where indie musician Ariel Pink hides the heroes behind his curtains from the “Man in Black”), and that’s only because I couldn’t find the proper picture I needed under the CC-BY license.
2. Don’t draw everything, No2
While you could animate every movement, it is far faster to draw the body without hands, and then animate these seperately. Each moving element lives in its own transparent PNG or PSD image, and it’s then animated in the video editor instead of Photoshop, after its placed on its own video track. Only the full-body scenes (e.g. the ones where the heroes are chased) are animated frame by frame.
3. The story is most important
I must have played the story in my mind, and the pacing of that story, 500 times before I layed down the song file on my video editor’s audio track. Next thing to do is to put markers with text in the timeline, describing each scene. Each scene must follow the beat, so it has to start/end on obvious auditory stimuli.
4. Keep it simple
If you can’t draw something, draw something else. There were 3-4 scenes that I wanted them to be different originally, but they were very complex to achieve, so I settled for something simpler. Overall, I used only 5 video tracks, 1 for the background, and 4 for the animation.
5. Blend frames to give illusion of movement
In certain occasions (e.g. blinking of eyes, smiling) you can use a simple transition from the end of one PNG with the beginning of the other. This gives the illusion of more frames than what are actually drawn.
Nice article apart from that…
Edited 2012-04-20 10:19 UTC
For 99.99% of the people it’s OK though …
Edited 2012-04-20 10:39 UTC
Yes I’d like to watch this but I don’t have flash installed here, is there a youtube link?
It’s been interesting following Eugenia’s path into the realm of creativity and I’m looking forward to seeing this venture into animation (something I’ve always been interested in myself).
You may want to check this out: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flashvideoreplacer/
Replaces inline flash video with native inline video.
There’s a Youtube link, here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr9a8MZFDLk&hd=1
Also, if you go to its vimeo page, it can also play via HTML5, but the embedded version doesn’t.
Thanks for the link, I just saw it and I liked it (liked the music too). Very much ‘inspired’ as far as character designs go but really it’s amazing what a single person can accomplish in this day an age with the help of computers while combining their own work with that gratiously being offered for free by others.
I’d love to see a more technical in-depth article of the ways the computer can increase productivity/speed of creation by using stuff like the mentioned automatic in-betweening.
Unfortunately Vimeo never added proper HTML5 support with open codecs (WebM/Theora), even though they promised at some point. So Youtube is really the only big option so far.
Vimeo did try to implement Theora, but it was unacceptably slow and low quality. Vimeo is a site primarily for artistic works, so such inconveniences are not acceptable among its users. Youtube is more “whatever”.
They could revisit the matter with the release of WebM, which is around for a while already and has sufficient competitive quality. I guess they either despaired, or lost interest in open codecs.
Yeah, if you’re going to present it in flash, there is an easier way to animate things… use flash.
I’ve been following some nice tutorials by this dude: http://www.youtube.com/user/SaveAsAwesome/videos
He uses Adobe Flash for the animations and also Sony Vegas for putting it all together. I think Flash is a better tool for animation than Photoshop.
There are a few really good tools out there. Of them, the Moho “continuation” product is really worth looking at (though it is now unfortunately called “Anime Studio”, which gives the wrong impression completely.) It is a really simple to use vector based animation suite, and the kinds of things that take countless hours using Eugenia’s techniques, actually take next to no time in AnimeStudio. It runs on Windows and Mac and is really reasonably priced. The older version worked on BeOS – maybe even Linux. It’s really worth looking at. You get a lot of the more complex aspects of animation for free, or at a really rapid rate. I can’t rate it enough. Amazing software.
Agreed. Moho had a “skeletor tracking” feature that worked in a similar way to most 3D packages rigging tools: you draw your (vector) character, then define a basic skeletor and then “attach” each part of the character to the corresponding skeletor piece. Then it was just a matter of defining keyframes by changing the skeletor on different points of the timeline and Moho takes care of the tweening. I know that Flash may have similar features but Moho was (IMHO) better suited for classic animation.
The results may look somewhat stiff when compared to a carefully drawn frame by frame animation done on something like Toon Boom in the same way that some modern cartoons look “odd” compared to classic Chuck Jones and Tex Avery stuff but it makes it a whole lot easier and look quite good for today’s animation standards.
Eugenia,
Loved your hand drawn characters. They kind of resemble Seth MacFarlane’s characters in a lot of ways. And I remember that I loved your Vision you showed here on OSAlert a few years back. Have you done or considered doing any web comics? I’d love to check it out if you did.
Indeed, a lot of the style I decided to go with is McFarlane’s. The rest is Futurama.
Congrats on an awesome music video.
I usually just yawn through the music videos on tv these days. That one captured me.
Edited 2012-04-20 14:15 UTC
Touching with a touch of eerie!
Based on what I’ve read about the creation of conventional animated 2D content, a lot of what you’ve outlined is the way that things have worked in that industry for a long time. There are artists who specialize in creating background landscapes, and artists who specialize in character animation. You used to see the animators flipping through frame content drawn on transparent cells back in the day; now, you see them drawing the characters into layers with Wacom digitizers in specialized tools. Economics is definitely a factor. Look at any cartoon nowadays; you’ll see a lot of static backgrounds — or slowly panning static backgrounds — while the characters in the foreground change. There simply isn’t enough time to do everything, unless you’re working on a feature film; in which, the budgets are a lot larger. Nice summary.
Didn’t you used to be Eugenia Loli-Queru?
Her website is still http://eugenia.queru.com/
There is a FOSS tool dedicated to hand-drawn animation, called “Synfig”. They’ve been around for quite a while and it appears to be under active development. I have no idea how good or suitable it is for specific tasks, as I don’t draw much myself or even animate, but I was rather impressed when I saw it many moons ago.
It was not mentioned in the thread, so I thought I’d drop the link: http://www.synfig.org
Edit: I might have found their site through this very board, the “raison d’etre” on the top of the home page actually quotes “OSAlert”
Edited 2012-04-23 23:19 UTC
I know Synfig well (my husband and I had dinner with the developer once at our place too), but I don’t have a Linux machine anymore (the laptop I had for Linux doesn’t turn ON anymore), plus I wanted something that I can move fast-enough on Sony Vegas. I don’t mind the extra work anyway, I just felt I had more control on Photoshop/Gimp.
Oh, just for general info then: they seem to be _quite_ active with development: There is a Mac and a Windows build now as well
(Haven’t tried out any of the recent builds though)
Excuse me, but where is the attribution?