Ganko Transformation Process

Initial Plan

Ganko is mad at the giant Komodo Dragon because it broke her beloved baseball bat. She must now transform into her magical girl form to fight it. She smacks her magical gloves together and summons the magical energy from within her. It forms into a staff which she twirl in a cool way. From the staff magic energy climbs up her arms and spreads over her whole body. Leaving her in an embarrassing costume. Also to her displeasure, her pompadour is unraveled.  I will make some brief storyboards to organise the action and changes in angle.

Storyboards

I used Photoshop and an online template to make storyboards.  But I planned out far more content than I have time to successfully animate so I prioritised the important transformation related parts for the animatic.

Roughs 

After making the animatic in Animate using photos from the storyboards I first made rough versions of each storyboard with separate layers for the different moving elements of the transformation. Namely: The character, the staff and the effects. By figuring out the timing in the animatic it gives me an idea of how many in betweens I will need and where. I used different bright primary colours for each different layer so I could tell the elements apart when the lines get messy (which it tends to with my work). I use the regular (b) brush tool to draw because the (y) brush feels less natural and has a strange effect where lines change shape when the intersect with other lines.

Timing /Editing

I had to make a lot of changes to the timing from my animatic. Some timings that you can't get right until you experiment a bit. The shoe changing sequence ended up a lot longer than I first imagined but also one of my best animated cuts. I ended up cutting out the wrapping around effect from the rotating camera cut because it was very labour intensive and only looked mediocre. I replaced it with a flashy, almost explosion like effect, that allows more time to focus on the character design. I also cut off the end of the hand changing sequence in order to cut on movement and give the animation a better "rhythm". I also found that the animation has better flow if she ended up facing a different way than the original storyboards had (at the very end). And because it seemed to end quite abruptly I added another key pose of Ganko standing up strongly just to have a more satisfying ending.

Refinement/Cleaning

I decided against using a separate layer for cleans and decided it would be more efficient to just touch up and recolour the drawings on my rough layers as some of them were already quite clean. The bucket in Animate has the ability to close small gaps thankfully so not all the lines will have to be fully closed. Many of the frames are missing aspects of the design such as hair and clothing. So these will have to be added in this phase also.

Colouring & No compositing :'(

As my transformation changes camera angle multiple times. It didn't feel right yo use my detailed Vizcom background on just one of the shot so I ended up leaving it without. I would have like to have use a looped moving background like a typical magical girl transformation but I did not have enough time in the end. I coloured using the bucket tool in Animate, going colour by colour rather than frame by frame to preserve workflow. I strategically had earlier sorted the staff and effects on to their own layers so that I could have them easily go in front of the multicoloured character layer. Unfortunately I did not manage to get everything accurately coloured before the deadline.

At least this is still the best thing I have made so far (thought that isn't saying much right now).