I was asked by a friend of mine to make a banner and user icon for his YouTube channel, HammerOutAGame. The two pictures above were made for the user icon. I went for a striking colour scheme as shown in the influence art I was sent. Aside from that, I added some videogame icons, such as the Space Invaders barrier as the "A" in "Game" and the pixel art logo I designed.
Early concept, the logo was originally going to have artwork either side based on their interests.
Above is the final design, they added an extra member to the crew along the line so I had to balance the image out again. Fortunately the logo made a suitable placeholder on the right hand side to balance out the symmetrical layout.
If you haven't seen my previous entry, I'm going to start making posts where I deconstruct animation I've created. These posts are going to be a mix of tutorial and personal reflection. Some of the techniques I bring up may have different names, or not even be techniques at all, I'm just explaining my findings as I progress.
In Flash, I find there are dominantly two core forms of animation, symbol and tween based, and frame by frame drawing based. The previous entry gave some brief tips on getting the most out of symbol animation, so in this entry I'm going to explain some techniques I used in the small clip above.
This clip is built in three basic stages, anticipation, action and reaction. See the three blue drawings on the left for the keyframes. These are core for making many movements look interesting and less mechanical. Anticipation is the movement leading up to a motion, usually in the reverse motion of the intended motion. In this case, the anticipation is the duck towards the book, a downwards motion that then leads into the looking up motion. The next stage is the action itself, in the case of this clip that's the looking up motion. Finally, the reaction. This is the "follow on" motion, which is usually hair or drapery (clothes) for me. This stage helps the movement bounce, rather than stopping unnaturally.
Once these three keys are sketched, it's on to the mapping. By this, I mean planning out how each part of the body will move. In an old test I did, I sent out some keyframes for people to inbetween. In the results, a lot of people literally drew the middle position. This method really doesn't work with motion as the animation looks awkward and has no depth to it. Instead, I've started animating each part of the body separately. In this case, I first animated the legs, as they are the top layer. Animating things separately creates an offset effect and breaks up the motion, rather than having everything stop at once, everything has it's own individual timing and rules. By the time this is done, you should have something like the second clip, with all the solid sections inbetweened, following the three stage rule on their own timing. The final step is to add drapery/hair. This acts to break the motion up a little and create an overall reaction stage. In the Animators Survival Kit, the rule says that drapery always stops last. You can see that effect in place on this. As the head drops down, the hair continues that motion. As it starts to go up, the hair has a delay before following this movement and bouncing back up. Finally I added a bounce at the end just as an extra reaction stage and to add some more life. The next stage will be colouring. For now I've used flat colours, I'll explain cel shading in a future entry.
**EDIT**
One final technique I forgot to mention is the opposite movement between the head and the book. This subtle technique just puts more space between them in the action, adding more of an impact to it.
I was commissioned to make this animation for http://nickbasile.com/ The animation style is relatively simple compared to my other work as more episodes are planned to time restrictions, and as I do my commissions currently at low prices due to them they're on the side of my other work.
For this episode I was simply given the dialogue and produced a rough storyboard and character model samples for the client. Once these were given the all clear, I proceeded to animate the whole video. The animation style is similar to that on my old series, Universithing (seen below).
I handled this project a little different to usual, I set myself certain times to work on the project, and also created an invoice once the project was done for the records. I also kept regular contact with the client in this project and let them know everything I worked on and changed.
Another trick experience taught me with previous projects was to add a watermark to the video until payment came through, This meant I could freely send the client copies of the video without any risks (I've had a client try to run with a video before).
This project wasn't without problems though, fortunately these were only small ones, such as export glitches, changing sound levels and making slight adjustments to the video itself that the client pointed out. All in all the animation went well for time and budget limits, and I have learned to take a more professional and structured approach to commissioned work. My new workflow is as follows:
Take request and find out enough information to agree on a price with the client
Discuss art direction/influences to get a better idea of the work, also request any reference material needed.
Request a percentage of the payment up front to assure money can transfer without fail.
Create storyboard/animatic and art style samples for the client and tweak as appropriate.
As an animator it's important that I can adapt to drawing different styles. This Christmas card commission for Tom Kerin (http://www.singingmutestuff.com/) was a great chance to try this out, while tweaking the art style in my own way too. The first difference in style was that the lineart changes depending on the colouring, which creates a "gummy" texture, as a friend of mine calls it. These softer colours can be useful when it comes to shading as there's less attention on the outlines and more on form. To help make the picture a little more dynamic, I rounded off the background and tapered it inwards towards the top.
You can see the art style I based this picture on in the video below:
As a bit of perspective practice I came up with this concept art for Oddball's "Eternal Library".
For this picture I used four points; top, center, left and right. The top reference point was high up, which let me place the viewpoint on the ground, emphasizing the height of the book cases. The idea behind the library was that it's constantly being expanded, so I made some of it look piled on as if it's been dropped into place. To add to the idea of space, I whited out the background and added a tint for distance fading on the back towers.
