Animating: Scene 2 & scene 3

 In this blog post I will show the process behind animating scene 2 and scene 3. I animated both of the scenes in OpenToonz because the software is working a little bit quicker than Blender. 

Scene 2 was supposed to be a scene of the character uploading a picture to Instagram to show the impact social media has on young people. At first I thought about simply doing a cut and transitioning from the selfie-taking to the scrolling through instagram. One thing I did not think about was the fact that those two scenes are fairly similar and jumping from one to another would create a jump cut, which makes an eye jump when looking at a given scene. It happens when two scenes are too similar to each other and there is a cut transition between those two. I decided to change the transition and incorporate the motion of the character changing the position of the phone. To do that quite quickly, I used the rotating tool. It helped me to keep the phone in the same shape always and the process was not as long as it would be if I drew every single frame separately. 

This is how the process looked like when I worked only on the layer with the phone. The hand was on a different layer, therefore I had to move it separately. It was a good and a bad thing at the same time, a good thing when I was erasing something in the 'hands' layer, I was not erasing the phone, but a bad thing because I was not able to move those two things at the same time. 

To draw the picture the character was posting, I simply copied the actual picture the characters took in the first scene, rotated it and scaled it down. This process was enjoyable but it did took a lot of time and effort. Animation really is a very time-consuming thing to do and it teaches me patience. I used to have big issues with patience - I was very impatient, but working on animations and art in general really helped me to work on this flaw. I like that I do not get discouraged when something takes more time than expected but I also can motivate myself to get things done in time, which I think I have really proven during my time at DMUIC so far. I do everything I can so everything is turned in in time, even though I was doing two schools at the same time. 

Third scene was something I simply was worried about, because third scene is a walk cycle. First term I have worked on the walk cycle a little bit, but it was not highly successful. I mean, it worked but I wish it looked better. Now, with everything I have learned and looked at works of different artists, I can see my mistake from first term. I decided to move a character from point A to point B, instead of doing the walk cycle in place and moving the background. This term I have more knowledge, so I just created a walk cycle in place and moved the wall behind the character. Generally I am a lot happier with the outcome than I was in the first term and I can see how I am improving which makes me very happy. 

I drew the character basing on what I have worked on earlier and I started working on the walk cycle. I just did it in one place, so I did not have to worry about spacing. I also drew a background and chose a beige wall because it is supposed to look like a school and schools usually have very boring walls, at least from my experience. I made sure the character would really contrast with everything around it so it would be very visible. 

On the right-hand side of this screenshot, there is my color palette and the timeline. The timeline in OpenToonz is vertical which can be confusing at first but it is easy to get used to. Also if I was really bothered by it, I can change it into a horizontal timeline. In the image it is visible that I have an onion skin turned on. Onion skin helps me see the frame before the one I am drawing. I can also turn on the onion skin for the frames after the one I am drawing so it is easier to draw inbetweens. 

Lastly, I noticed that the background was jumping too fast, so I placed a frame in between every two frames I have already drew to smooth it out. When moving the background, I had to drag the image and fill in the space that would be left without any background. It was not very difficult. 

Here are the scenes, put together with the first scene:

I am really proud of myself for the work I have created. I think I am improving so much from project to project.