My project is chugging along at an alarmingly slow pace, which I had anticipated but is no less frustrating. I decided to use plain ol’ white A4 printer paper, as I’m going to need a lot of paper and this type is cheap and in plentiful supply. Traditional animators use a backlit drawing board in order to let them see the last few frames they’ve animated through the paper, but I am not fortunate enough to own one of theses. Therefore, I pulled an old glass table out of the garage and attempted to build my own with a desk lamp and some manoeuvring, to moderate success. It’s pretty much only useful in a very dark room, so I feel like somewhat of a reclusive hobbit when I’m animating.
Make shift drawing table. I accidentally stabbed myself on a rusty bit of metal that was sticking out from the iron and I thought I was going to die from blood poisoning but I didn’t. Unfortunately that meant I had no choice but to continue.
The story of the animation has not changed since my last blog post, though I suspect as I continue my work some shots might be sacrificed because of time constraints.
At the very top I linked a video of a test animation I did, using a charcoal pencil on the printer paper. It worked reasonably well, even though some of the frames are not very well aligned because I just took the photos quickly on my phone. I was still pretty amazed by how sharp the photos were though – kudos to 2017 smartphones and their siq cameras. Even though I had hunted around on the internet, I couldn’t find a program that would easily let me composit the frames into a video, as the only ones I could find were targeted purely towards stop-motion animation. Therefore I decided to use Adobe Premiere Pro to put together this sequence, as I already knew how to use this software which saved me a lot of time as there was no learning curve associated with using the program. However, this meant that my plan of “x amount of frames per second” turned into more of a, “hey this looks pretty good”, approach, which I don’t think affected the final result negatively.
From here on in I pretty much just have a tonne of drawing to do, which should be pretty straight forward but also very time consuming. With some good time planning I should be able to deliver a short narrative that has some sort of arc. I hope that there will be no more blood shed, but I can’t make any guarantees. After all, art is pain. Or beauty. Whatever they say. I should get back to drawing.