42. Same old, Same old

Damn, I've been dead busy with playing fancy dressing and drinking (for the live action of the film, obviously - well mainly) that I forgot to post last week! Anyway there is much more black on the character now, and shading takes twice longer... If you want to start a 2d film, hand drawn, here's an advice, make everything white! Damn that black T-Shirt is killing me.

So you can forgive me, here's a little GIF, the walking drunk (it's not the shot that caused me lots of pain):

Walking

37. Loops

In animation we use a lot of cycles to save time on repetitive action, such as walks or runs. A cycle is just an animation that loops i.e. the first frame and the last one are from the same motion and we don't notice a change in rythme when the animation starts again.

Looping a video can get very tricky, but it will save a tremendous time in animation..

For exemple I'm working on a shot where the guy walks toward the camera, it's a 10 second shot, witch would mean 120 frames to animate. Way to much.

So let's turn this video (video is speed up):

Original

into this cycle :

Drawing

The first step is to find where the action repeats:

Selection

Now the first and last frames are kind of the same but the guy is moving forward...  Rubbish... So let's scale and rotate him so it matches as much as possible.

Scale

It's starting to get there, but because it's video, nothing loops at the same frames. It needs to be fixed, element by elements:

Torso

Each individual part of the body is looped. If you don't pay attention to the background.

Legs

Then I put the guy back together:

Loop

Et voila, if you look only at the guy,  the video is looping. You can see that I don't loop the lower body and upper body at the same frame, same with the arm and the guitar. That's another tricky part, as it's important to keep a natural look, but once drawn:

Drawing

This fella can walk, forever!

An I only animated 21 frames!

Don't forget that first and last frame shouldn't be the same one, or you would have twice the same frame. You need to match 2 frames, and then remove the last one, if that makes any sense :)

It's the last day of my kickstarter if you wanna chip in, it's here: www.deadmansreachfilm.com

36. Live action, Again

I finished animating all the shots I filmed so far, so I'm back on live action. I have a few "classic" shot to shoot, i.e. me going around in my living room pretending to be in the desert, but after that I'll start the more complex shots, involving old fashion special effects such as building a fake head in latex. Ho boy that's gonna be fun!

Here, a mock up layout of one of the shots I film yesterday:

Drunk

And just a little reminder that the kickstarter is still going! (9 days left!)

23. Kick-Starter

I'm seriously considering putting DeadMan's Reach on KickStarter. The main reason being that I'm starting week 23 of a production that was suppose to be 24 weeks. And I can't see how I can finish 7 mins of animation in 1 week... So I need to extend the production quite dramatically...

So what's this Kick-Starter thing?? Well kick-starter is a founding platform for creative projects.

Basically you pre-sell stuffs before  making a project, and you use the money you got from the sell to actually create the project. i.e. For an album, you pre-sell your album, then make the album, then send the album to the people how pre-bought it.

It's a one month process where you need as much word of mouth as possible to reach the amount you need to do (finish) the project. It's a all or nothing. If the amount is not reached you pay nothing and the project get nothing!

It's kind of what I started doing with the sell of the DeadMan's Reach sketch book, but on a completely different scale. (I would have done a Kick-Starter straight from the start but It wasn't available in the UK at the time).

For all of you who bought the book already there will be special, cheaper stuff!

Here are the products (Rewards) I would be selling:

The book, obviously:

T-Shirts:

Original Animation Drawings, like this one:

Original BackGrounds, like that one:

And some more surprises!

As always let me know what you think.

11. Ranch

Last week went well, not having any distractions really helped. I have now 14 Backgrounds completed, and I'm feeling a bit more confident.

This week I'm gonna keep on drawing as many backgrounds as possible, but I'll leave the Shading for later.

I'm also planing to finish the film first shot. The background is ready and it has 3 characters to be animated.

Good challenge!

In the mean time here is a finished BG, a RANCH:

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