Tonight I took my first stab at hand-drawn animation. It was tough! It was a very enlightening experience though. I did a walking sequence. I could have just done a stationary walk cycle but instead I decided to have him move across the screen which made it extra tough for me. I scrapped my first attempt because I had designed a character with too much detail in the face that I found it almost impossible to draw it exactly the same as it moved across the screen. I started over with a simpler character. The guy you see above. His face was simple enough that I was able to redraw it fairly consistently as it moved across.
The other aspect of this test that was particularly challenging was the medium of dry-erase markers. I was truly learning something new frame by frame. There is a reason that most dry-erase animations commonly present the line itself animating to create a static drawing. Every time you re-trace over a line that’s already there you end up creating a white line within that. The hardest part was erasing the lines from a previous frame after I had drawn the next. I found that if I used a Charcoal Stump Shader I could erase the lines from my previous frame with more precision and keep the lines that I wanted to save untouched. Without it I would’ve been lost, honestly.
It’s kind of tough to see while it plays but in the first few frames I animate the arm movement incorrectly. The left arm follows the left leg rather than the inverse which is what we naturally do when we walk. Halfway through the walk, I fix it and finish the rest using the correct movement.
It took me two hours to draw 15 frames! The one encouraging thing is that I found myself getting better as I got closer to the end. If I were to redo it again I’m absolutely positive that I would do it both better and faster.
This is awesome. Even though it’s simple its very difficult.
good work!
very cool, what software did you use to animate him?
Thanks for the comment. The animation is just hand drawn on a dry-erase board. But I did take the pictures into Adobe After Effects to actually create my quicktime. After Effects isn’t pertinent, though. You could use Quicktime Pro to do the same thing.
thanks, i’ll google that.