#animation production

I’m trying Mr Dot! I’m trying! 

I definitely tend to get stuck in that overthinking phase where I can’t think of solution to potential problem so I don’t get anything done and give up, or just go around in circles and theh eventually give up.
But I’m making it a point to remind myself that to solve certain problems I must actually try them out in some capacity. Only then I can get clarity for what might work - or not. I am visual thinker for the most part after all and I always learned best from experience.

I pretty much have character designs decided on, I just have to stylistically unify them, make myself reference sheets and do some test animations to see what kinds of brushes I want to use and figure out pipeline for coloring that will be as painless as possible and easy to replicate for potential coloring assistant   

I feel like I’m on the good way with background style too. Since I can separate my short into 3 “acts”, I figured I can make them different and more experimental depending on what I need. Especially third one, but I have yet to do anything for that since background will be more animated in that one and that will be explored more in animation tests I plan to do.

By the way, I recommend watching that video at the top of this post, I really like that dude’s work ethic and philosophy.
Other than this I will start working on sound design and music. I fiddled around with Cakewalk for a bit, it’s not that scary xD and I found some good music writing class on Skillshare(notsponsored) that is simple enough for me to understand, so I feel like I’m set for starting on that.
 Other thing is I plan to break down and revise my animatic even more, like, I want to make it as close to finished product as possible so that when I start animating final thing I’d have most problems solved, and hopefully music by the end too xD

That much for this update! Deadline is approaching, less than 7 months left and fire is lit under my ass to pick up the pace, so more frequent updates might be expected :)

I am! I am…. I just got derailed this month due to some health issues and poor time management and working on some other lighter things that I could squeeze in and had strength to do… But I haven’t touched this project at all.

I was thinking about it, how to proceed and all that since I got stuck on concept side of things and I figured I need to work on storyboard/animatik more, but I will ramp it up so I’ll be making concepts art and test shots as I go along. Once I have that figured out as detailed as possible that should make whole production side of things a lot easier, or at least help plan it as efficiently as possible.

But I did promise in last entry that I’ll share some other inspirations for how I want this thing to feel and look, so let’s get into that:
 

Sangatsu no Lion

Probably my main go to for the style I’m going for. I especially love how they portray peoples thoughts and feelings in this show through visuals and sound design and I would like for something like that to be at base for my own short too, since it is, at core, more about conveying feelings rather then a standard story, even though I do have it split in that 3 arc structure.
I am still unsure about the art style itself, but that’s what I’ll be exploring when I start refining my animatik.
As far as those are concerned,3-gatsuandMob Psycho are my starting points, and the work od KyoAnistudio in general is inspirational to me as well, because other then looking gorgeous, they know how to do their drama and characters, but I won’t be shooting forthatlevel of polish, oh no, I feel overwhelmed just thinking about it, But simple, experimantal and energetic look other two have going feels more manageable, we’ll see.

Hopefully April will be more productive for this lil’ big project.
To keep myself accountable I’ll strive to update here at the end of every week. That should help with planning my monthly update videos too.

Here’s some more gifs for the end~

No, seriously, I have no idea what I’m doing. You’d think I do with my experience*  but I really don’t

Some time last year I got back into 2D animation and out of need to try something more structured for practice I came up with this short sequence to serve as… a guide of sorts for that. Here’s animatic I did for that one

Really simple, right? Just some scene out of context. I even tried to animate one of the shots in PS. it was nightmare O__O

Anyway, because I took too long, I lost the motivation to complete it, so it went to my scrap-folder. Besides that, that scene is based on something that’s kinda-sort of touchy/personal subject to me, so it didn’t feel so good to get immersed in it sometimes,and animation was supposed to fun time for me so of course I’m gonna chuck it to the side if it feels bad to work on.

HowEveR  — the the host of Animator Guild discord group Howard Whimshurst announced 1 year short film challenge for our community (and beyond, everyone can participate) and I got sudden spark to do revive this little experiment from the trash, and confront it properly.

Link to the contest info

Thankfully, monthly challenge for February at AG discord was storyboard, so I used that opportunity to jump right into it and I already have two iterations of storyboard and one animatic, which I plan to revisit and polish further.

Not sure how much of it I should show here though.. I would want  to keep this already plotless short as spoiler free as possible… Hmmm… How about ambiguous artsy teaser photos? And you’ll get more hints on it as we go.
I did say more about it in my most recent video which is also shared here, right before this post actually, so check that out.

But yeah… I’m kind of struggling how to move onto one of the next stages, which would be concept art.

Do I start with… Style exploration? Moodshots to decide on color palettes? Layout of the rooms? Do I need to build them in 3D? I would have to consult with animatic about that tho…. And I want to polish that some more…
Character design too, see what animation style/pipeline I should use… Lot’s of decisions to make…

Well, I do have my work cut out for me for this month. Pre-production involves a lot of things and it’s not necessarily linear so I’ll be going back and forth between concepts and animatic a lot in this process. This is also good time to make use of Visual Boards to inform these decisions.

Maybe next post should be about that? Sure, why not.

Stay tuned for References, Inspirations and perhaps some sketch explorations.

TBC!

* I worked for 1 year aprox as storyboard/animatic artist for HOPA games cut scenes, and did few comics back in the day… That and few animation exercises and two flipbooks for my high school and college assignments… That’s the extent of my experience xD