getting back into it..

Back in february I started working on the Belling the Cat animation, based on Aesop’s fable. I’d created a voice tracks using a text-to-speech service and made based animatic. at the time i was really trying to wrap my head around learning Blender, specifically it’s Grease Pencil to create 2D animations. The Grease Pencil is essentially a vector plan in a 3D space, with it’s own independant timeline. Think flash animation: frame by frame and tweened vector shapes. Then u get all the 3D goodness of Blender to do some really advanced things. Unfortunately the workflow is a bit cumbersome for me, because I had so much experience with the simple and intuitive drawing tools Flash (now called Animate) offfered.

Though I hadn’t done any flash in several years, when I opened it up and got started I was suprised how much muscle memory had be retained. I was able to be quite productive with flash creating some animations. The allure of Blender continued to call me and I answered, putting Flash/Animate down again and focusing on learning Blender again. Over the past few months I’ve continued to work though a number of Blender courses, both free and paid. Along the way I learned quite a bit about modeling and rigging characters. I also explored programatic and procedural modeling, which is still VERY interesting for me. After building and attempting to rig and animate them, i found myself wrestling with making the animations and transformations of the meshes look how I wanted. Natural or even decently convincing animation was far off in the distance and I started to rethink my approach.

I’d somehow convinced myself that I needed to learn all these things in order to start building the animations I envisioned. I stepped back and started to think about frames/shots.. like a comic book or animatic. This eventually brought me back to Flash/Animate again!

This time I was going to lean into my strengths and start building my animations like I build software. Starting with a prototype of shapes animated over the voice track. I was able to nail a lot of the motion that wasn’t clear in previous attempts, by prototpying and iterating on the feeling before adding any details/character art. Once the prototype felt right, it was time to start replacing shapes with instances of our mouse puppet.

This new process very productive so far and has significantly improved how quickly I’ve been able to create animations. Building pieces of animation like software modules that can be assembled and put together. Applying the process has already surfaced some great practices to apply in future projects.