Hindsight

The animation on the Gallery Of Doom was a bit more involved than I anticipated. The deadline had been moved to today, Oct. 8, and I turned in the final shot last night. In hindsight, I've learned a lot - about animating with ToonBoom, about communicating with the director, and about how I work.

It was an incredible challenge for me to work the animation in with the shots involving a live actor. I have all the more admiration for a film mixing the two, such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I thought those shots wouldn't be too hard because I would be able to see on the screen where everything is supposed be at a particular point in time. Mechanical, connect the dots, right? Well I encountered two huge issues: one, since each live action shot was changing every frame (fast-action shots that involved running), there would be more drawings than I anticipated and two, since the camera moves/angles were fairly dramatic, I had real trouble figuring out the perspective and keeping it correct on some of the drawings.

Patrick had the foresight to give me reference video, as himself playing the character, so I could see what the character was supposed to be doing - where he was coming from, at what angle, where he was going, any special action, etc. and what props were in the frame that the character had to deal with - like a door. That helped tremendously when discussing the character action with him.

This was a good project to work on in anticipation of AnimationMentor. Patrick was patient and gave me great feedback on the work I was doing. I have more confidence now to tackle those drawings that I think I couldn't do - things I just had to learn myself. I couldn't just tell Patrick that I couldn't do a shot - I had to figure out a way to make it work. This also combats my tendency towards procrastination - instead of worrying and over-thinking a drawing, I'm learning to just get on with on it.