I found my most obvious skill gap was my lack of knowledge on animating only digitally and not from pen and paper then advancing to computer programs for editing.
In doing this I needed to increase my understanding of Flash animation and other digital animation programs. I also learned to improve my digital drawing and animations technics.
My first animation was also filling a skill gap in integrating 2D and 3D animation, this was a test as I had never done this before and as a first time still needed a lot of improvement but my topic was changed and I began to concentrate more on what was important.
My original knowledge of flash animation was very basic, I knew about making keyframes and drawing with the pen tool. But threw this year I have learn about changing the layers property to effect the others layers, for example burn layers or overlay. changing opacity and frame size as well as the advantages of creating symbols and why they are so often used. The stylized Cinderella animation uses the majority of these flash tools, especially layer effects to give a overlay of a soft paper technic.
I Researched common animation technic used in animations then tried most of them my self to see how effectively they work.
one of the first things I researched was why shows liked loony toons use smudge/zip lines in animation, There are where a Characters body zips out of a scene or quickly grab an object in one or two frames of animation. This is used to save time in animation and make the movement higher passed and comical by using less frames it also save animators time rather than drawing a person walking on and off screen.
I did thing in my animation of a girl picing up coffee and It was proven very effective and good practice as animating digitally, this only took me one day to animate and had respectable results.
Japanies animations (or anime), substitutes movement and animation for high detail background and characters only animating what is necessary, majority of the time this is all driven by speech rather than movement They also use the graphic novels there shows are based of of as a beginning to there story board and lay out. Following there's rules I animated a comic strip from one of my Favorite graphic novels using movement only where I thought it was necessary.
The next challenge I faced in my project was coloring an animation in a stylized manner, as-well as finding a way to paint this style digitally.
My style was chosen to be a light pastly colors with a chalk/water color texture for my two main male character and scribble pen for my wolfs.
I followed Photoshop tutorials on how to remove my hard edges and make my work look more organic like chalk and water color.
this was my result. How ever this took a long time so I tried this again but taking shortcuts to make it more realistic for animation.
After doing more research I found that I would be unable to color my characters like this on flash, however Photoshop cs6 had a time line much like flash. I learned how to use this tool in the newest Photoshop but it was unfortunately not as useful as I had hoped as I had to still render it all together in flash or premerpro. However this was a first for me animating in color and I fond the Photoshop time line useful to see errors ahead of exporting.
All together I feel more confident in my skills with flash, a program I was organically intimidated and infuriated by I now find more enjoyable. this has helped my improve my digital 2D animation and techniques used to some time and improve its quality. how to color with a more natural or traditional look on Photoshop coloring animations using Photoshop time line and collaborating them all in to my final animation.
