48. Brushes! part 1

Allright, so before I decided weather or not it was possible to do any secondary animation on computer, I had to check that I could replicate the drawings fully digitally. For this I would need a brush (in photoshop, or what ever other software) that replicates the way my pen behave on paper.

This actually means that I need to replicate what the drawn lines look like once scanned.

Step 1: What to replicate

I start by drawing various type of strokes: Slow, fast, overlapping, light and heavy strokes.

Step 2: Understanding parameters

The amount of parameters can be overwhelming  but if you take them one by one it's actually straight forward.

- First you need to choose your brush size to match the pen. You won't be able to change the size of your brush once its finished, it will look odd. If you need a bigger brush, youll need to scan a bigger pen and create a new brush.

From now on stroke on the right is pen stroke on the left is "cg"

I've set the hardness to 33% because the pen is not drawing perfectly sharp.

Note: the size of your brush depends on the size of your document (because it's set in pixels) here i'm working at 300 dpi. If I was at 600 dpi i'd have to scale my brush up twice.

I keep it round because it's a classic pen.

- Then lets set the shape dynamics:

The size jitter "randomise" the size of the brush in the range you set (here the brush can be 50% bigger or smaller). The size is also control by the pen pressure and I've put a minimum size so the brush doesn't disappear when I'm drawing lightly. (Here you need to match the diameter of your lightest pen stroke)

The size jitter represent the flow of ink of your pen and the randomness due to the paper, not the wobbliness of your stroke due to how you draw. I am not using the angle jitter and roundness jitter since my brush is round.

-  Scattering moves the brush in different axis, i am not using it here.

- Textures and Dual Brush aren't useful in this case.

- Color Dynamics

Color dynamics gives your stroke a more natural/scanned look. Scanner never scan black as black, it's multicolor darkness. Here my foreground color is a very dark blue and my background color is a very dark red. They are being mixed randomly at 57%.

A brush is just a succession of dots really close to each other. What the randomizing option does is give each dot a different value, in hue, brightness and saturation. The purity seams to multiply the effect. At -100 the brush turns black and white...

Note that if you un-tick "apply per tip" the color changes is applied to the whole stroke. It can give some nice effects.

- Transfer

Here you'll need to set the opacity and flow of your brush. As you can see on the strokes on the left, the pen doesn't cover the paper regularly (more or less ink comes up).

The opacity and flow are both transparency but one is applied by stroke, the other one is applied as you draw. With opacity you need to lift your pen and draw again to have a color twice less transparent whereas with flow if you draw twice in the same place in a single stroke, this place will be twice less transparent.

The important thing at this stage is to play with the pressure of your wacom pen. You might end up really easily with a completely transparent brush when your not putting a lot of pressure on your pen. You need to set the minimum opacity to something that suite you.

- brush pose is some kind of 3d ness of your pen on the wacom. lets not bother with it.

- The next parameters have no options. I change them on/off as I draw depending on the effect I want to give:

noise:

Adds sharp noise to the stroke.

- Wet edge

Makes the center of the brush lighter and the edges darker

- build-up is some kind of airbrush option.

- Smoothing smooth you brush stroke, I wouldn't use it with a tablet if you want a hand drawn feel...

At this point you should have a brush fairly similar to your pen:

red arrows show the cg brush strokes.

The only option i couldn't find is to have more opacity/flow at the beginning of a stroke, I think it would look much more natural. If anyone knows how to do this, let me know!

Sorry for the bad english, this took more time then i though and I need to go back to work...

Cheerios

46. Screen Print

Last saturday at dawn (10.30am) completely hangover, I walked more then an hour in the sun to pick up the screen prints. And man was it worth it! They are brilliant. It's my first screen print and I love it, I love it so much I might screen print some backgrounds from the film.

I will start sending them on monday to a few lucky backers.

I printed with Atom Printing, I highly recommend them, great work, fast and affordable.

Here's the print:

If you wanna get one, they're £20, just chuck me an email.

And here's how screen prints are made, it's pretty rad!

And a video that shows the screen printing process, nothing to do whit atom printing or the film, it's just a youtube video :)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxXdndoas94&w=420&h=315]

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):

40. Half

Today I finished shot MO_03_00 witch means that I reached 5 minutes 30 of animation! That's half the film animated!

This shot was a bitch, I emptied a whole pen to finish it, here's a little preview:

38. Animating

Not much to say this week, I've been animating for the last few weeks, and I'm getting faster at it (not sure if it's better though) One more shot and I get to shoot live action again.

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):

into this cycle :

The first step is to find where the action repeats:

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.

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:

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

Then I put the guy back together:

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:

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:

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

33. Deadman's Reach Kickstarter is ON

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/59642578 w=500&h=281] visit Animating DeadMan's Reach now! And enjoy awesome rewards and stories about the film!

27. Zoetrope Gif

  I finished shooting 3 sequences last week and I now have 12 new shots that I can animate.

Some of them are quite scary...

This one for instance, each drawing is a proper a4 drawing... shaded and all.

I made it into a kind of zoetrope gif, for fun. So that's 9 frames out of the 26 the shot needs...

Comment here

25. Live Action

I've now finished animating everything I shot a will back, so today and probably tomorrow will be shooting live action again. It's quite a pain in the ass, but it has to be done... the bigest trouble is that, since last time, my hair grew quite a lot, and I'm gonna have to shave my beard... What a drag!

Here's another little GIF, enjoy:

I'm a bit out of Ideas on what I should post, Do you have anything you'd like me to explain about animation, or anything you'd like to see?

Let me know HERE.

24. Shading animation

First of all, sorry for not posting yesterday. I'm sure the 2 visitors that were eager to discover more about the making of DeadMan's Reach were very disappointed, Mum... Conor... sorry.

Anyway.

I didn't post because I was going to post a video that I filmed with a GoPro stuck to my head. I thought it would be fun to see how I shade animation...

Turns out it took me more than 16 hours to shade the 33 frames of the particular shot I'm working on, and because of that:

1) I couldn't draw with a GoPro on my head for 16 hours, I had to stopped after 8 hours... Neck fixing is not included in the film budget.

2) Even speed up 3000 time, the video was extremely boring.

So, I decided to post a GIF instead. It's crazy how gifs are more popular than video, maybe its the equivalent of Disc/ CD but in the 2010: GIF / Vimeo

Anyway, here is what took me 16 hours to draw, color and shade...

And I'm still working on it... I'm now thinking "Summer 2016" is a good release date.

You can comment here.

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.

22. Back to Black

I finished the pencil animation for the Bedroom sequence, Those of you who bought the book had a preview of what the film animation will look like, thanks for your feedbacks!

I switched  back to shading for a few days before starting a new sequence witch involves a different drawing technique...

Here is what 3 hours of shading looks like:

[vimeo 51915738 w=500 h=281]

17. 56 Backgrounds

I have now drawn 56 Backgrounds. I have a few left and my goal is to finish most of them this week and start animation next week.

I will need to make a new planning obviously...

There is a few POV in the film and I haven't decided if they will be fully animated backgrounds and characters or if it will only be a big background with pans.

Anyway, here's what it looks like when I try to review most of the BGs:

Post a Comment

9. New BackGround

Last week was a bit slow, mainly due to the fact that I spend 5 hours colouring A THIRD of an A3 in red. Using a O.4 mm pen... Bloody Diner sits. It felt like Math lessons all over again!

Anyway, I'm one background behind, I will catch up somehow this week.

Mooe sent me the first draft of here Harry Nilsson's "One" cover, and it's brilliant,

I can't wait for you to hear it!

Mean while listen to here other songs, HERE. They're perfect for a monday morning. Or any other time!

This week plan is a bit serious...  Apart from the thursday afternoon Old Fashioned Stroll.

I need to sort out a proper PLANING for the backgrounds. I've finished 6 of them, out of 60 and I only have a few weeks to finish all of them.

I started by the hardest ones, yet I need a realistic schedule. Today starts the 9th week. It needs to get a bit more intense.

Any one care to Produce me?

The great news is that I am 20 Books away from adding 1 more month to the production! Making it a proper 6 month production.

Here is one of the new BackGrounds, a Motel Room:

Feel free to leave comments HERE

8. Diner

I've finished 3 backgrounds: a London Tube Station, a Diner and a Saloon so far. And I need to start working faster now,  I should draw at least another 4 Backgrounds this week.

I'll need to take a day to set up the animation tools (Line test and animation table) and scan the final drawings.

The sales of the book have dramatically slowed down,

so I'm just dropping a few lines to remind you that you can help finance the film

by buying a Deadman's Reach book HERE or by making your friends buy it!

Thanks!

And Here is the Diner:

You can let me know what you think of it, here.