In order to save time, I plan on animating a person running on the spot, the using my editing software, pan and crop the animation across the screen so it looks like he is running.
My first animation I produced of the main protagonist running was unsuccessful. I tried to do it quickly, and tried to have the clothes waving and his hair being adjusted by the wind. It took me hours. And the final product was nothing short of terrible.
I had a look on the internet for some suggestions and tips on animating, found a few, then watch some work by some of my favourite animation studios and thought how they would have done that, or drawn this, or how many frames would they use to do this etc. I then went back and started drawing up the rough sketches for the second attempt at the running animation. Once I had the rough sketches done I could think about adding more detail like his clothes and hair, each time placing the previous frame underneath my current one, so that I could trace the hair so it didn’t change too much and so that the proportions between each frame stayed relatively alike.
Once all the final sketches were done, I scanned each frame individually (which takes ages) and used animation shop to put the frames in sequence and see if the animation is smooth (obviously because I had spent hours producing these little animations, I was very forgiving if something may have been a bit out of place). Once happy I’ll get all the clean frames and trace them with my amazing pen ;) traditionally in animation, once the clean drawings have been made, producing the clean solid black lines would be done on the computer by using an onion skin and producing a vector path over the top so you can see the original sketch and produce a vector image as a separate picture using a pen tool. I didn’t do this, as I’m hopeless at using the pen tools and vectors. So instead I found a pen, that when used and the image scanned, left you with relatively solid lines to work with. So I traced every frame with a pen, then with these final clean solid, frames, scanned them all in and opened each image on Paint Shop Pro. Here I had to colour in each frame individually, which took a long time. The backgrounds of each frame I made one solid colour. This is so when it comes to editing, I can use the ‘chroma keyer’ to remove the background, and lay each animation over the scenes that I produced on simply 3D. this is pretty much the same as the technique used in movies, known as green/blue screen. Once coloured in, I would produce the animation in ‘Sony Vegas’, and render it as a separate video file. I actually reproduced the running animation three times befor ei was happy with how it looked.
Above are two frames that I drew, the first two show the original animation and how that looked (after my poor first attempt), and the second two show the redrawn animation after realising the second version i did still looked incorrect.
I had to use a drawing style that i could easily and quickly draw, and that was quite flexible. By flexible, i mean im able to manipulate it easily. Due to time restrictions, i wasn't able to produce high quality drawings, that were 'really' pleasing to look at,as the drawing and colouring process would take twice as long, instead i had to keep them simple, and because of that i feel the final look of the whole animation isn't going to look as polished as i would have liked.
This process is what I went through for each of the animations I produced. As I did more and more I began to get much better. The last two scenes I animated for my rough cut were the mid shots of the main protagonist running frantically, and the very last animation you see were the boy raises his head. These are my two favourite animations I did, as I feel they are quite smooth and although I thought I would struggle to do them, and yes, they did take a long time, they look nice and are pretty close to more professional animations I’ve seen, which I am personally proud of.
After putting together my rough cut, i noticed i still had a bit to do. some scenes were still not coloured, or, completely incomplete, such as the monster running mid shot, and the scene where the boy gets up off the floor and runs off (sample clip in the rough cut). I also felt I needed to redo the running long shots, as the running seemed too slow and looked unrealistic, and also the shot where the boy turns into the ally looks like its lacking some frames of animation and skips round the corner too quick. Also the car that passes at the beginning needs to be redone, and completely thought over.
