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For People Crazy About 2D Animation!

Acme Punched! is for people crazy about 2D animation. It may be enjoyed by beginners and others, but it is aimed at animators who know already something about the process of animation and the basics of character animation. In large part, it will attempt to provide a deep look into the problem solving that goes on in my head as I work out a scene, often in step-by-step posts that I will sometimes enter in "real time", without knowing in advance what the outcome will be. Mistakes and false starts will not only be included but emphasized, so that the creative process of animation will be portrayed realistically. And, while my own bias is for 2D drawn animation, many of the effects and principles discussed here can apply to CGI 3D animation as well. I hope the blog will prove useful and instructive for all.

-Jim Bradrick

Thursday, January 17, 2013

No. 27, Problem Four: Forty Seconds In Two Weeks (Part 3)

Storyboard to Production Art


With the storyboard approved, I was anxious and able to get to work on the actual production artwork.  First I created detailed "tight" pencil drawings of all the elements--backgrounds, props, Santa--everything except one view of the client's product, a beer fermenter that was to be the showpiece of the last scene.  This would be created from a photograph provided by the company.

Here are a few of the drawings:

The bar with long shot of the fireplace.  This was the most complex drawing of the whole project.
The mantle in closeup.


These were all scanned and imported to Animate Pro, each on its own layer, ready for tracing and color.

Finally, there was the fermenter, a shiny stainless steel tank on a stand, with valves and pipes.  Though I had good color photos of this, I felt that the lighting depicted was not right for the setting, so in Photoshop I stripped out all the color, made it into a high-contrast black-and white-image, and then deleted all but the most essential linear elements.  This is what I then imported into Animate Pro:
The fermenter in linear form. 
From now I would be doing everything entirely in Animate Pro.  After inking everthing in black with a thin but variable brush, I then filled all the forms with temporary colors, using a palette limited to just six values of blue-gray.  This was partly to establish my value range and partly to prove that all the inking gaps were closed.



Next: Color and Movement, and the Finished Movie

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