2D Assessment Blog FULL THING

Initial Plan

Zed runs in from the far background just before a massive explosion happens in the distance. Thus his exclamation ("Wow, Holy Smokes!").

Phase 1: Dumbing down the Dialogue

The obvious first step was to dumb down the dialogue to the phonetic sounds. This should help to set a good guide for when the body language and lip syncs will change with the inflections of the audio.
 

Phase 2: Line of action layer

Next I animated the key poses in a very simplified line of action form. This included the intro with Zed running in but I thought that it would be better to leave out the explosion and animate it last if there was time due to the strain of deadlines and other subjects.

This stage is also where the idea of Zed's overwhelming enthusiasm causing him to do a backwards somersault came about. It was more of a joke that originally started to entertain myself but when I realized it could possibly work I decided to keep it.

Phase 3: Rough Layer (Construction)

This looks to be the most time consuming phase. I am half happy with my first attempt but the beginning section of Zed running in is too fast and the 360 spin I was originally going for is also too fast and not very clear.

Part of me is saying that it's fine because that part is not actually marked but the perfectionist inside me is very distracted by it.

I ended up changing the start to be better and have clearer movement. It also has better pacing to allow the viewer's eye to settle for a moment before the action continues with Zed's exclamation.

Phase 4: Rough Layer (Lip Sync and Expression)

Next comes the lip flappin'. This is my first time really attempting to animate lip flaps to audio so I read up a bit beforehand with the "Animator's Survival Kit" PDF on moodle. The information there suggests a lot of animators get into the habit of abiding by the "2 frame" rule where you put the picture 2 frames ahead of the sound. However, the guide also said this rule should not be obeyed blindly and that the best way is to find what looks best through watching and listening.

For me the result I decided on was having the picture one frame ahead of the audio. I think this works well because the actual sound of a word comes from the vowel sound of us opening our mouth, so its important to hit that vowel sound spot on. The result of this is the frames with consonant sounds such as the 'L' in "Holy" don't actually have any sound, but the overall picture looks better.


The guide also said to avoid animating every syllable of a word, and simplifiying it just down to the key sounds (thus the dumbing down of the dialogue) but I really wanted the chance to animate the 'm' and 'k' mouth shapes for "smoke". So for this purpose I animated the mouth shapes for my words on ones, just so that I had enough space to fit 4 drawings into one 1 syllable word. 

Phase 5: Clean Lines

This phase was also rather time-consuming, but because it's just brain-dead grunt-work it was a lot less interesting than doing roughs. 1 hour lo-fi hip hop beats and caffeine were key.

For the most part I attempted to line Zed on a new layer with the paintbrush tool on smooth and with pen pressure turned on, as we were taught in class, but I found that in some small detailed areas (such as the hands and face) it was alot easier to just use the normal brush tool. I also was not used to the way the lines changed their shape when they intersected with other lines (with the paintbursh tool) and sometimes erasing was a struggle.

Seeing the cleaner version of the animation also made the mistakes clearer which allowed me to fix a few consistency issues with Zed's thicc thighs.

FINAL PHASE: Colour

This was also braindead grunt work for the most part. But I did occasionally run into difficulties with my messy smear frames which I solved in a few different ways:

• The first way I dealt with this was to simplfy Zed into blobs of colour. I did this here because this one was a full body smear and I had no guidelines on how to separate each colour.
• Another way I dealt with the smears was to have them in a closed shape so I could fill them in with bucket tool regularly.  
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• The third way was the 'Johnny Bravo style' extremely stretched smear that I also just filled with colour regularly as a closed shape.
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I have a tendency to overuse smears in my animation but I know that that comes from my own personal preference that I just happen to really enjoy the effect they have. In this animation I was happy with them aswell. In fact I belive they were important in allowing the very wide range of motion I had planned for such a short span of audio to be clear.