Doubledome

Doubledome (of Longhair & Doubledome) was one of the first ventures into digital ink and paint. It shows. This is really a very traditional handling of an animated image and although we experimented with both color and line at Knock Knock, we never really strayed too far from what we knew, mixing paint and slapping it on a cel. This is a good example of traditional ink and paint done digitally. Hopefully, "Man Story" will be a bit more sophisticated in its treatment of the animated image. hopefully I have learned something since 1998.

Finishing the Hula

When finishing a traditionally animated sequence in Illustrator, it is important to note several critical issues. First, make sure you animate your images larger than they will appear in the final file. This will insure accurate drawing and aid greatly in the final finish in Illustrator. Secondly, build and test your image as you go, it is essential to analyze each section as you are creating it in Illustrator, you can see you errors more clearly when you are taking a section at a time. The main two issues with this sort of technique is the fact that you are dealing with an image with no line and that you are going to get small "wobbles" no matter how accurate your initial animation is. Having no line creates a circumstance where accuracy is at a premium, without a border your image edge has to me right on otherwise you will definitely see a small flicker. The good thing about Illustrator is the fact that you can "zoom in" work in outline and manipulate points with relative ease. It is a tedious process, in many ways more tedious than traditional cel finish. Here is my progress on the Hula girl for my website, and although you will probably not be able to see the tiny flaws that remain, I assure you that they are there. But luckily the mistakes are manageable.

Dashboard Hula

Here is an extreme test for my little dashboard Hula character. I am animating this in a technique we developed at our studio years ago. It is no where near a traditional approach to animation (using construction, animating rough in order to feel out the motion) but it was much faster and eliminated the need for a larger animation team. We called it, "animating cleanly". Starting with a good pose of the developed character we began animating, cleaning up as best we could. It eliminated the need for a clean-up artist, and it took out much of the guess work for the inbetweeners, therefore making the process faster. With production schedules getting shorter and shorter, we felt the need to approach our animation in this way. It is imperative to have a good knowledge of anatomy to animate this way and it took a consistent hand by the inbetweeners to work in this production model. Did the animation suffer, probably. But it was fast and we did get better at it.