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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment