Let´s try again

My second video is done and finished and out there. So it´s time to start with another one. I think this time I might do something shorter, much simpler, but more detailed (better drawn). My first idea was a person playing a piano, but that didn´t interest me so much so I decided for something that might be a little more challenging and involves some background action (not much, just some).

The idea is a flying bird. The "camera" will be a little behind the bird, following it as it flies through a city. Could be good, if I manage to draw it properly.

I have started by watching a few videos of flying birds on YouTube (which I normally don´t do because I don´t care about birds much) to see how the bloody animals move. And after that, I´ve quickly drawn a few pictures to see if it works and to decide about the timing. The result is below.

Yes, it´s ugly and barely visible, but that was the point really. Not to spend too much time on this, it´s just a part of planning. From my last video, I have some experience with results of bad planning. And I want to avoid it this time. I think it doesn´t look bad as it is, it´s on 5 frames per second speed, which means that if I take the pictures (draw them better of course) and then put 3 frames between each two, it might work. I´ll probably make the flight longer later, but for now, this is enough to start with.

I have also heard, that if you draw frames continuously one after one, the action is smoother than if you do a few key drawings and then put another drawings in between them. So I think I´ll try that, I have nothing to lose.

Anyway, not a bad start, I´ll see if it works.

#9 The New Video

This will be a shorter one. I have finally uploaded the new video. And you can watch it here. Come on, you know you want to.

I am not so completely happy it, I think I may have aimed too high with this. It was a little complicated (as you can see in previous posts) and I it doesn´t look as smooth as I would want. But, there are some bits of the video I really like. After all, this is my second video, and I think there is quite a big progress from the last one. And I enjoyed all the drawing, and that´s the point.

So, that would be enough for this post, I have already starting drawing the next video, and it´ll be simpler, and hopefully more realistic. And maybe even better than this one, we´ll see.

#8 Combining pictures

Imagine you have two pictures and want to make them into one proper picture. You have drawn two layers of one picture using pencil, got both to computer and now you need to put the layers on top of each other so that it all works as intended. On the picture below is an example of what I mean, I have a picture of a hand holding a pencil (top layer) and a drawn knight (bottom layer) and I want the image that combines both.

It took me some googling and experimenting to find out that what I need is to let the picture with the knight as it is and cut the hand from the first picture. But! Cutting the hand by hand (ha, humour) would be madness. 

There is a nice tool in Gimp software, that can automatically select foreground, which is apparently what I want. If I understood the stuff I found by random googling well, it works by recognizing colours (or something like that) and separating the background from the foreground based on the colours (or something like that). On my picture (that you can see above) colours are not really involved, there is just line and the rest. Which can be easily fixed by colouring the parts of the picture I want to delete with some absurd colour. Like green.

   

And then just use the foreground select tool, which is described here. This selects the hand. Then all I did was inverse the selection (Ctrl+I) and delete everything selected (Ctrl+X). It all worked surprisingly well and quickly, but it took me a while to find out what do I want and how do I do it. So maybe someone finds this helpful.

After deleting the unnecessary bits, you can just put this picture with a hand on any other picture. And make it work as one picture.

#7 Size Matters

This time, I´d like to write about something quite important, and that´s size of the frames and size of the "screen" (you know, that window on YouTube). Because it´s something I didn´t think about much and now I have problems with it.

When I started drawing the frames for my next video (all frames are drawn by the way, now I am scanning it to computer, cleaning it in gimp, and maybe in future, adding some colours and nice backgrounds if I care enough to paint them). That´s a sentence with a very long interruption in the middle, let me start again. I drew all the frames on transparent papers of size A5. And for YouTube, your video should be in 16:9 format (they recommend 1280x720 pixels).

After drawing all the frames and scanning a few, I have realized, that A5 size paper is not, in fact, 16:9. Without bothering anybody with details, the 16:9 format is wide and A5 paper is not wide. Below is a picture showing how a 16:9 frame looks like (the red line) and how one of my A5 frames look like.

It´s not very clear to me how to solve this. Stretching all my frames to get them wider is a ridiculous thought, because it would deform all the shapes, so that´s not a way. Making the frames larger (in computer) and then cutting a top strip and bottom strip is not a solution either, because the part of the frame I would have to delete would be too big. Leaving a white strip on each side of every frame (just like in the picture above) might work. Unless you have some action happening in the left or the right edge of the frame. Like I do. See below.

As I see it, there is only one way. I have tried to avoid it but I can´t. Leaving the frames as they are and having those ugly black strips on the left and right side. It´ll look like a French film from the 60s that doesn´t fit any modern screen, but I think I might get away with it if I call it vintage style video. From now, I am doing a vintage style video.

P.S. the frames on the pictures in this post are yellow. The only reason for that is to create contrast so that it´s clear that the frame is smaller than screen. The real frames are not yellow and it will not be yellow in the final video. Just explaining if anybody cared.

#6 Problems With Breathing

This time, I have decided to get the scene where the knight is just standing and breathing to a finished state. It was much worse than I expected.
During the inking process, I didn´t pay as much attention as I should have. That resulted in a terrible video, where the helmet of the knight changed shape all the time and it was incredibly messy. In this post, I´ll write about my three attempts to correct it.

Attempt 1

Now, what to do with a video where solid things change shape. I have redrawn all the frames again. It´s only 8 frames, not pleasant, but no big deal. And the result was better, but not much. The helmet needed to be the same shape the whole time, and it wasn´t.

Attempt 2

I´ve decided, that when you breath, your head doesn´t move at all (which is a lie). So I took the first frame, I have deleted everything except the head and copied it to all the other frames. Perfect, right? Now the head doesn´t change shape. Watch the video below to see the result of that.

Terrible, it looks ridiculous. He is not moving his head at all. It looks unnatural. Also, his left shoulder moves weirdly (actually, it changes shape in an unnatural way). I was quite happy about the rest. It wasn´t perfect but, I think it was good enough.

Attempt 3

My last attempt. I have decided to copy the head from first frame, just like in No. 2, but this time, I would move it slightly in every frame in the direction of the shoulders. Which means up and left. 

As you can see for yourself, still no perfection. But I think I´ll leave it like that. It is an improvement from the previous versions, and I don´t want to spend too much time on a short unimportant scene like that, which doesn´t help the story at all.

Now, Iď like to concentrate on making the scene where the knight hits the pencil (for the first time) with his shield. So, that should be topic of the next post.

#5 Some More Scenes

As promised last time, this blog post will contain some more finished scenes (finished in the vaguest possible meaning).

Scene One 

I thought it might be nice to have a scene where the knight doesn´t do anything, just waits for the next move of the artist. However, if the knight stood still, it would be like essence of boredom, he should move a little. And one of the obvious things people tend to do even when they are not doing anything is breathing. In this case, I thought the knight might be tired from all the jumping around on the paper so he might be breathing heavily. Watch the video below to see what I mean.

I have only drawn it once, of course, I just looped it four times for the blog, the timing needs some work, the breathing looks too quick to me like this. I am not sure where in the video this scene should be used, but maybe when the artist is looking for some weapons in his drawer, it might be nice to just show the knight breathing heavily. 

Scene Two

The next one is a piece where the knight hits the pencil with his shield and makes the artist drop it. Not so much to say this time, the video is below. Unlike the first video in this blog, this one seems too slow, which can be helped very easily after scanning all the frames when I will be putting the video together.

Scene Three

The last part of today´s post is about the scene where the knight avoids the hand with the eraser. This consists of three movements, firstly, the knight moves his body to the (his) left, then he raises his right leg and then he falls down on his knees. The frames in a video are below again, and as always, it needs some more work when playing the frames and timing the whole thing. Because the first two movements merged into one, which is not what I would want. So I think a longer pause between the two movements could fix the problem. 

Ok, that´s all for this time. I´ll just explain what I haven´t written before. These videos I post here are "finished" only in the meaning that I think I don´t need to draw more frames. When I draw all the frames for whole video, I will need to do some cleaning and inking, then scanning all the frames (this will be the worst part thanks to Mr. Hewlett, Mr. Packard and their stupid scanner that is only 2 months old and already doesn´t work properly), then some pc cleaning (erasing backgrounds and putting the frames together, probably in Gimp), then adding some colours, then finally making the video (probably in Windows Movie Maker, just like my first video). 

So, that´s my plan. Still a long way to go.

#4 First Scene

I´ve decided to start by drawing all scenes with the knight. By that I mean drawing only the knight and his movements. The rest (the hand of the artist with a pencil) can be added later. If everything goes well.

How I draw the frames

I have decided to draw the frames in a way based on ignorance. In my animated video, fractions of a second are units of time to think in. Which, as you can probably tell, is a useless unit because it´s too short to imagine. So I start by drawing two frames. The starting pose, and the finishing pose. Then I add frames in between, so I draw a frame that is between the first and the last. Now I have three frames. Then I draw one frame between the first and the second and another between second and the third. Then I take photos of the frames, play it in the 24 fps speed and see if it´s too fast. If it is, I add some frames in between the others and so on. Simple enough.

I have spent some time thinking about how should I draw a frame in between two other frames. Because you need the three papers to be secured on each other so that they don´t move. In all the videos and documents about animation I´ve seen, they had some special tables with spikes coming up from them. And their papers had holes in them, so you just put them on the spikes and everything is great and easy. Surprisingly, I don´t own a table like that, I am too mean to buy one and too clumsy to build one. So I am using a low budget version, which you can see on the pictures below.

The First Scene

I have started by drawing the scene where the knight comes to life and hits the artist´s pencil with his shield. I am drawing this without the artist´s hand, as I´ve written in the beginning of this post. Only the future will show whether it´s a mistake or not.
My first idea was for the knight to start in the "drawn position" and simply wave the shield to the side. On the picture below, this means getting from the left pose to the right one (sorry about the quality of the photo, I´ll do better next time).

But then I stood up from my comfortable chair and tried how I would do this if I were the knight (what an adventurer I am!). And I´ve realized that it would be more natural to move the shield a little in the opposite direction and then wave it to the side. This explanation probably doesn´t explain it much, but the picture below might.

Below is the video of all the finished frames for this scene. In total, this video consists of 14 drawn frames, 4 of them are for the initial movement in the opposite direction, and the 10 are for the main action with the shield. It´s still not perfect, but I think all the problems can be solved by skipping one or two frames to make the action smoother.

This is enough photos and videos for this post and I think I consider the knight´s movement for this scene finished for now. In the next post, I´ll probably post my progress on few more scenes, because I seem to be drawing frames much faster than writing this blog.

#3 The Planning Continued

What is this post about

As promised, I have taken the drawings I was writing about in last blog entry and I have redrawn them in a proper size (in my case A5) which is the size of frames I want.

Changes of the story

Firstly, I should explain that I have decided to lose the part where the artist folds the paper, and then the knight cuts himself through the paper (it´s boxes 15-21 from my previous post). I thought the whole scene with folding paper looked a little weird and I wasn´t sure how to draw it so that it would look good. The same applies for the knight cutting the paper. If we forget the fact that it doesn´t make much sense, the few pictures I've drawn for that particular scene look quite boring, I think. To sum it up, drawing all the frames would take some time. And I don´t want to waste time and paper on drawing something boring and uninteresting. Especially when the rest of the story can survive quite well without that bit.

Story in Motion

Now I finally get to the topic of this post. That is, the frames containing the important poses of the characters. You can see it in a video below, I just took the few pictures and played them in a slow speed (1 fps - 1 frame per second) so that I can see how the finished thing will look like. This is the first time I´ve tried something like this, but I think it´s a good idea.

The result of this is, that I will (probably) leave the scene where the knight kicks the pencil away. It looks uninteresting, and the pencil can stay there, I don´t see any harm in that. The truth is, that it looks uninteresting only because it´s drawn in an uninteresting way (the knight from profile, that´s a little lame). So, throwing it away or redrawing it so that it´s more interesting is something I´ll have to decide later. No need to rush with that.

Next Post

In number 4, I´ll finally get to drawing some frames. It´s about time, I think.

#2 The Story and Planning

I have an idea about what my animated video should be about so I´ll describe it here. It will be a person drawing a knight on a paper. Then the knight comes to life and attacks the person who drew him (attacks the artist, in other words).

First thing that comes to mind is "this story is deeply unoriginal, it sounds like animator vs animation from YouTube". And it´s true, of course. On the other hand, total originality is not my goal and I like this idea, so I´m going to stick to it. I like it, because it involves a lot of action, so it´ll be probably interesting to draw. Or perhaps it won´t, I´ll see. 

I started by drawing roughly what the video should be like, some sketches of the important moments. You can see these below. It´s really very rough. It´s my version of writing the things down. I drew it, because I think writing something like a script wouldn´t be very helpful to me.

On the first picture, there are the first six important moments, the artist is drawing a knight (I don´t know what will the knight look like at this stage, I will think about that later) in the first three boxes. Then the knight hits the pencil with his shield (4), gets back to his initial position (5) and then we see the shocked author of the drawing (6).

The artist is trying to fight the knight with his pencil (7), but the knight hits the pencil with his shield again and takes it down (8), then hews it with his sword (9) and kicks the damaged pencil away (10). The artist goes to a drawer (11) and tries to hit the knight with an eraser (12).

Hitting different places with the eraser, the knight always escapes (13, 14), so the artist folds the paper to hide the knight (15, 16, 18). Box 17 didn´t go well, so lets ignore it.

The artist is shocked again (19) because the knight is cutting throught the paper (20) and gets out (21). So the artist goes to his drawer again (22) and uses a compass to pin the knight to one place (23, 24).

The artist makes a circle around the trapped knight (25, 26), and the surprised knight (27) falls into a hole created by the circle (28).



So, that´s it, the whole thing I will be trying to make into a short animated video. Next thing I plan to do is to draw these images (boxes) as frames (I will be drawing it on a transparent paper of size A5).

It may be a little too ambitious and too hard, now that I look at it. But if I didn't try, I wouldn't know, would I?