New Video

I have finally finished my last video. You can watch it here.
The process of making this new one started here. So, I´ve decided to write some statistics about it in case someone was interested.

The video has 8.64 seconds in total. The final version on Youtube is longer because I added the intro and the end titles (neither of which was really necessary, I suppose :D ). Anyway, 8.64 seconds. It took me about three weeks of not really intensive work and (this is not a surprise) the most boring part was the cleaning, colouring  and similar stuff on computer. I enjoy the drawing, these technical things are not so interesting for me.

Back to the statistics. The whole thing is on 25 frames per second, because of Windows movie maker that I use to transform the images into a video. You have to decide about the time for which each frame will be shown, not how many will there be in a second. And 1/24 is not a nice number. But 1/25=0.04 is, therefore 25 fps. Some parts of the video (short ones) have the flying bird frames shown on 12.5 fps, half the usual. These are parts where the action is slow (for example when the bird is gliding from left to right). I think it still looks good enough, even though there are not enough frames.

I have drawn 110 images of the bird in different stages, scanned it to computer, deleted the white backgrounds, and coloured the bird (really annoying). Then three pictures of the buildings (which can also be called three layers of background, I suppose). You can see them here or, obviously, in the video. I drew and inked these by hand and then coloured them in a computer. For the lowest layer of background, I have used watercolours and tempera colours. I wrote about these backgrounds in a previous post.

If you are into finance stuff, the transparent paper (only for drawing the bird) I used here cost me approximately 6.6 EUR = 8.6 USD = 5.6 GBP, pick your favourite currency. It was all drawn on an A4 size paper, with a 16:9 rectangle (the screen).

That´s all I had to write today, thanks for watching the video (if you did) and thanks for reading this post (if you did).

Backgrounds Again

In my last post, I was writing about the buildings in the background. The idea here is, that there is blank space between the buildings. And obviously, there needs to be something like a distant background to fill the gap.

The first idea I had was quite obvious. There should be the rest of the city in the distant background. Then I thought about it. It would be quite hard to paint, and it wouldn´t make much sense. It would create an impression that there are the buildings passing by, then there is some strange large gap and then there is a distant rest of the city.

The second idea I had was a forest. It doesn´t make much sense either, but maybe it could have been some kind of park in the city. And there would be a contrast city vs. forest, which I liked. And I painted the forest background.

I´ve never painted a forest before, so I just followed the instructions from a video by Mark Crilley. My forest doesn´t look perfect on this picture, but it would definitely be enough for a background in a short video. The problem is, it doesn´t look good when used as a background for the animation I have, so I won´t use this one.

The last idea was to make it just open sky. It´s not original, exciting, shocking or funny, just a sky. So I painted a sky. I´ve tried it with the animation I have so far (the buildings with the bird) and it looks ok, so I guess I´ll use this.

And, surprisingly, I think it looks better as a picture alone than the forest did. And it took about half the time of painting the forest. I guess sometimes it takes time to get what you want. And I think that´s enough for today.

Background

As I´ve written in my last post, I am trying to do some passing background buildings. This update is only here to show how these will look. If you click on the pictures, you´ll see them in a more finished state.

I think there  is no need to add more detail, because it will be moving. Nobody will notice if the windows are not perfectly shaped or something like that. At least I hope nobody will.

I´m also thinking of adding colours, because like this, it might be a little confusing when the three pictures are combined into one. I have also drawn a few frames of the bird, because the flying sequence was too short.

Now, I can make some risky estimations based on the stuff I have processed in the computer to a more final stage. I think the final video will have around 8 seconds. That sounds very short, but just to put it in context, in the beginning, I was planning for 3 seconds, so there will be almost 200% more stuff :D. And I think it should be finished in a week.

Moving Background

As I wrote last time, in my new video, I will need flying through a city. That involves some buildings movement, unfortunately. I´ve never done this before, but my idea how to do it is quite simple. I´ll just have two buildings on the sides and nothing in middle. And I will make this picture bigger and bigger, so that the buildings will appear closer and closer and they disappear eventually.

I did a little test to see how it might work.

I think it looks good enough. I´ll daw better buildings (obviously it won´t be just boxes with lines). Then it might look really good. I think.

I´ve also had some progress with drawing the animated bird. I´ve drawn 60 frames (which is a big number by my standards), that you can see below. Again, not bad at all, I think I´ll keep it that way.

Now, I´d like to draw the background buildings (and see if my idea works), then clean the 60 frames of the bird, so that I can combine it with the background (in a way I wrote about earlier) and finally the background that will be visible in between the passing buildings. Still a long way to go.

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.

#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?

#1 My first blog post

Who am I?

I am a 24-year-old student from a primitive European tribe called Czech republic. I´ve always liked drawing and I have tried making proper pictures or some short comics, but I didn't enjoy these so much. Now I am interested in traditional animation, and I would like to make a short animated video. And I have decided to make this blog to write about the process of making the video. Hopefully there will be a happy ending.

Why am I writing this blog?

There are three reasons. Firstly, I´d like to get myself motivated to finish the animation experiment of mine and I think this could help. Secondly, if I have a problem with something and write about it, somebody can help me (this is based on a wildly optimistic assumption that there will be at least one person reading this blog). And thirdly, if I describe what I do and how I do it, someone might find it helpful. 

What do I know about animation?

Nothing. I have made one short animated video, which could be much worse, I think. You can watch it below, if you want, but feel free not to if you don´t. I am trying to learn more about animation and I am at the beginning.

  

Is this a tutorial?

The fact that I know almost nothing about animation makes it really hard to call this a tutorial. I would say that this is a tutorial only if the resulting video is good. Which we can't know until we see it, can we?

That´s all

I think this could be enough for this post. Hopefully, I´ve explained what I want to do and what this is about and hopefully it makes some sense. Maybe it´s obvious, but any comments, opinions, ideas, advice, criticism and other forms of comments are welcome.

Thanks for reading all this!

P.S. If you skipped the post and just glanced down here, then I take back my thanking you and shame on you, you text-skipper.