Bounce Cycle

I love seeing this kind of thing on other people's animation blogs, so I thought I'd post the stages of this Ultrafoot bouncing cycle.

First the scribble pass:

Then I go through and solidify the forms, add the inbetweens, and repair the spacing and timing.

Sometimes the scribble pass is no more than squiggly lines, so rough that you can't tell what they are. Other times I get caught up a little and can't stop myself from adding elements like facial features and other details. It's usually a waste of time, though since they almost always have to be adjusted.
Then I add the details like facial features and an indication of clothes, and secondary motion like his hair and cape.

If someone else were doing the clean up, I'd do another pass to tighten things up and add the final details, but since I did the final line myself, I was able to skip that step.

Build 19

Seems like a good time for an update.



There's been some progress, but I want to take a moment to bitch about how difficult it's been for me to find time to work. Seems the world conspires against it! When I can manage it, I seem to just get little pockets of time. That's not conducive to animating. It takes me a couple hours just to get into it properly. A scene that might take me 8 hours if I could work on it all at once, takes 16 if I only get to work for two hours at a time.

Whew! That's off my chest. It might be hard to see what's going on in a lot of the new animation since it's just line art.

I couldn't resist working on the last scene with the dance moves. I've been anxious to replace those hideous storyboard drawings. Of course, what's replaced them is extremely rough still, but it's fun to post a scene this early. It gives an indication of my process. What you see there is my first pass, what I call the "scribble pass", where I just try to run through the scene and feel out the animation. I try to zip through it as quickly as I can. It's about the movement and not about the drawing.

Here it is again on it's own:

Take a Thug Take

"Takes" are a staple of cartoon humor, and I've put together a scene with seven in a row! Should be seven times funnier than any other cartoon!

I'm inclined to be selfish and do this scene myself, really get an opportunity to stretch some useful animation muscles. But I think instead, for the good of the project, I'll spread this one around. I'd like everyone involved (who's interested) to pick a number and do a thug take.

You'll need to design the thug first, and then stay a little within certain parameters.

• You don't have to use the exact same number of frames that I did in my place-holder animation. Do what you need to do for your special take.
  
• I'd like to say you can "go crazy", but not TOO crazy. It's a cartoony cartoon, but not the cartooniest cartoon. Something like this won't work in our context:

• Every thug wears the same outfit of black body suit and ski cap.

Sign up today!

For your edification:
I've knocked out my thug take. Here it is moving...

And stills...

Build 18

There's been some progress.

I've been working on a "dead spot" in the animatic where UF was standing waving to the crowd for too long. I decided to have him vamp for his adoring fans with some karate moves. The scene is a lot of fun, and full of things animators hate! Crowd scenes, animated camera moves, and weird camera angles. I think I got this idea because I've just seen Kung Fu Panda. Loved it!

This version also features a new music edit. I wanted to build up the phoney super hero getting suited up, so they've added a little to the front of the song for me.

There are also several other updates throughout. Enjoy!

What's Expected of Animators?

This is an unusual project in that there's no budget, no schedule, and no real client. (Of course I'm hoping to please the band, but probably for the most part they might prefer I put less into it and be finished already) I want the finished product to be an animation showcase for the studio, as well as for everyone working on it!, and yet I too am anxious to finish.

With that competing criteria, it could be confusing to know how to handle your animation assignments. Well I'm the DIRECTOR, and I'm here to make it more confusing! The answer is, do what you'd like and we'll work from there. To suggest what that means, here's some examples.

Nobody took scene 10, so I assigned it to myself. Here's the animatic/storyboard:

The simplest thing would be to make a graphic with the thug's arms and legs flailing and just scale it up and off screen, much like the place-holder art. That might have served, but there was a lot more opportunity for fun animation. Here's what I did instead:

It's hard to see, but I really enjoyed doing some full animation (on 2s) of the thug flying through space, obviously not following the storyboards very closely, but having fun with the set up.

Here's another scene that I handled very differently:

Maybe you can tell there are no inbetweens between these poses...

Only some squash on the foot and some secondary on his cape and clothes. It's a very economical scene and I think it looks great that way!

So do what feels right for you and the scene! Send me roughs and check in if you have questions.

Thug Designs

Anybody want to help with designing a half dozen (or so) thugs for Ultrafoot to send running scared?

Assignments

Since we're all doing this for free and I want it to be as fun and rewarding as it can be, whenever possible I'd like people to be able to pick their own assignments.

Here's what needs doing:

Scene 2

• Clean up (Clean up on scenes 2 and 3 was done, but I think it could look a lot better)
  

Scene 3

• Clean up
• Background layout - interior of the costume shop
  

Scene 4

• Clean up - My animation is rough, I know I'm asking a lot from clean up!
• Background layout
  

Scene 5

• Effects animation - the clean up artist put in an indication of leaves blowing around, I like the idea, but I'd like to work on something more dynamic, a bigger pile of leaves and some dust maybe.
• Background painting
  

Scene 6

• Add some bounce to the van
• Flash adjustments to Ultrafoot's animation. The clean up artist got the right idea, but this needs a little finess. For example, you can see he floats up off the ground for a moment.
• Effects animation - There's a puff of smoke when Ultrafoot takes off but I'd like to see it bigger, more animated and dynamic.
• Background - we need a scrolling city street scene, nothing too fancy.
  

Scene 7

• Slight repair to the run cycle animation

Scene 8

• Combination of animation and clean up. Ultrafoot's zip in needs to be animated (this might be considered effects animation) His stamp and jump need assisting and cleaning.
• The van's bounce into the air looks good, but it needs to land on it's side.
  
• Background layout and even some background animation because I want to see the buildings jump a little when UF brings his foot down.
  

Scene 9

• Animation

Scene 10

• Animation of flayling thug
• Background

Scene 15

• Animation

Scene 16

• Animation - Ultrafoot bolts awake and lifts his newly ultrafied foot.

Scene 18

• Animation
• Background/Effects animation - I want to see Ultrafoot knock a hole in the clouds

Scene 19

• Animation - Ultrafoot's foot serves as a scene transition wipe.

Pick your favorite and let me know what you want to do!

Backgrounds and Layouts

One of the things that drove me bonkers on Ruby Rocket was that there was almost no opportunity to properly compose the screen. I did the storyboards absolutely as fast as I could, often reducing the background to just a couple of slashes to perhaps indicate that something was back there. There was supposed to be a "layout" stage where the backgrounds and character poses would be tightened up before finished animation and backgrounds would be done. Didn't happen, and I was left trying to figure out how to squeeze the animation into cluttered and ill-conceived backdrops so that it could be seen. (This is all on me, and not a reflection of the terrific background work I got!)

We have an opportunity now to correct that mistake (and others). For many scenes, I'll ask for a background layout sketch, something simple and complimentary to the character animation. I'll drop those sketches into the animatic to make sure it's all working before doing a finished painting.

I'm looking for a fairly simple and cartoony style for the backgrounds, but also painterly, not flat shapes filled with ugly flat colors like you'd see on Family Guy or The Simpsons. (Funny shows, but hideously ugly!) Here's some inspirational examples:





Ruby Rocket backgrounds were very detailed and elaborate and I want to get away from that with Ultrafoot. I'd rather see attention paid to design and color, not a lot of detail. If you're working on backgrounds, imagine you have to make 20 of them in a month. That mind set should help keep the backgrounds peppy!

I could talk a lot about what it means for the background to compliment the animation, but the selfless, cartoon loving John K. has done it better:
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2008/06/bg-layout-tips-for-nate.html
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/10/eager-beaver-1946-functional-beautiful.html
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2008/07/organizing-bg-layout-elements.html

And if you're up for even more, here's just every post he made with the label "composition"
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/search/label/composition

John K. is basically providing an animation production master class for free!

Inking

This is a cell from scene 2 in the rough animation stage.






You can see I'm going for a thick, brush stroke kind of line.

You can use either Flash or Illustrator for clean up. We'll just see how it goes.

Some recommendations:
In Flash, you can use Object Drawing mode. This makes each individual brush stroke sort of a group, but not really. That is, it keeps each stroke you make separate from the rest of the paint, so you can grab it and manipulate it individually. But you can also drag the vectors around with the arrow tool, or erase. Give it a try!

Illustrator-
Illustrator has some advantages. You can make a much cleaner stroke, and you can easily manipulate it after you've drawn it with those handy vector bars...
Makes it real easy to nudge your line around until it's juuuuust perfect! Definitely an advantage if you don't yet have a Cintiq. Problem is, I'd say it's much harder to know when it's perfect because you can't step through your frames very easily.

Process-
-Flash
Create a layer above the rough animation for your clean up. Where you need to separate layers, make holds, or convert items to symbols may already be indicated in the rough, but feel free to do these things as you see fit.

-Illustrator
There are probably good tricks for going back and forth between Illustrator and Flash that I don't know. Here's the process I've worked out.

• You'll need to export the rough animation frames from Flash somehow. If there's just a few frames, you can simply export jpgs of those frames. If there's a lot, you might export the whole movie as a jpg sequence. Maybe this is something I'll do for some of you.
  
• Open a new Illustrator file. Dimensions don't really matter
• Select Cmd+1. This centers your stage and makes it fit on your screen. This is important for registration
• Select File/Place... and select the first rough jpg. I like to lock the layer so I don't accidentally draw over it or move it.
  
• Create a new layer for your ink.
• Set your brush settings. You probably want between a 3pt and 6pt brush, depending on how small and detailed the drawing is. And you want to make the diameter pressure sensitive. That's what makes your line taper. You can set that by double clicking a round brush in the brushes window.
• You can also adjust the "fidelity" which affects how many anchor points are made. A low fidelity number has fewer points and acts kind of like "smoothing" in Flash. Good for long strokes like in my sample. The higher the number, the more closely the stroke you make is going to follow the wiggles of your stylus by adding lots of points. You'll want a higher fidelity for drawing things with more detail like faces. You can find that dialog box by hitting enter when you have the brush tool selected.
  

• Clean away! Create new layers for each rough and a layer above it for the ink. Remeber to hit Cmd+1 before you do, or your jpg lands in a different place!
  
• Here's the coolest thing! You can export a swf directly from Illustrator. When you've cleaned up your scene, hide all the rough layers so they're not included. Make sure visibility is on all your ink layers. Then select File/Export... and select Flash(swf) from the format options. Under the Export As drop down menu, select AI layers to SWF frames.
• You can then import the swf you just made into Flash. All your nice clean vector artwork is there and registered! You find each stroke you made in Illustrator will be a group, so I usually do a big edit multiple/select all/break apart.

So, it's a process, but the Illustrator drawing tools are much better for the look I want than you get in Flash. If Flash had the brush options of Illustrator...well, that would be a happy day! This would all be easier and more fun if we were all in a nice big office and got to actually work together. Another happy day to look forward to.

Here's a lot more FANTASTIC information about inking from John K's blog:
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/search/label/inking

Let me know if you have any questions! Assignments going out soon!

Flash File Setups

Here's how this is going to work...

I have the master file with each scene converted to a symbol. I'll paste that scene into it's own Flash file to hand out to you, named with the scene number and version number. So if you're the first person to work on scene 7, you'll get 7 _v00.fla. You'll update the version number when you turn it in, example: 7_v01.fla. (Sound familiar?)

Symbol naming convention-
When you make a symbol, name it: scene number-dot-symbol number. So if you're working in scene 3, you'll name the first symbol 3.1, then following symbols 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, etc... This way when I paste your scene into the master file, there will be no symbol naming conflicts as there might be if people use names like "head" or "hand".

Because this is such a small project, and essentially traditionally animated, I don't think we have to create a model pack or shared library like you might do with other Flash cartoons.

Next...
Inking Process

Let's Get Rolling!

If you're just stumbling across this blog, I want to explain that from this point on it will mainly be used as a communication tool between the director (me) and the other contributors (animators, animation assistants, background painters, etc., all working off site, and all selflessly volunteering their efforts!)

I can also tell you I may occasionally reference our previous project, Ruby Rocket, Private Detective, which you can learn about here: http://rubyrocketpi.blogspot.com/2008/02/about-ruby-rocket.html

And so...to my colleagues:
Many things about or collaboration on this project are going to be the same as they were on Ruby, but some things will be different too.

Same:

• I intend to use the same production pipeline; animation, clean up, and paint done directly in Flash, (Illustrator may be more appropriate for clean up if we can work it smoothly into the pipeline) backgrounds in Photoshop, compositing in After Effects. (As before, you're welcome to introduce whatever tools you'd like to use to complete your tasks, but I think everyone's pretty comfortable with that process.)
• I'll break the project into individual scenes to hand out for animation, clean up or painting.
• We'll transfer files back and forth to each other over the same FTP site.
  

Different:

• The style of Ultrafoot is different than Ruby. The style of the animation is looser, squishier, crazier, but at the same time the drawings themselves are cleaner, tighter, not so rough or sketchy. The clean up line will be a relatively thick, black brush line.
• The cartoonier style may allow for more effective use of Flash symbols to get some traditional cartoony bounciness in an efficient Flash like way. (More about this later)
• There's more time to be properly deliberate about things. With Ruby, there was supposed to be a step between storyboard and animation called layout, but it had to be skipped. As a result, the animators and background artists had to interpret my intentions with very little informatioin to go on. Mostly it worked out, but often it really did not!
  
• Retakes! We'll see if I have the nerve for it as we progress, but right now my feeling is I really want to see what we can do, not what we can do easily or quickly. For the most part because of Ruby's tight schedule, I felt I had to accept what was turned in and move on or handle any fixes myself (with some exceptions of course). Some of the scenes that look complete in the current build need to be redone, and I'll discuss why.
• I won't get to work as hard! Here I am saying how much more deliberate I want to be with Ultrafoot than I was on Ruby, but I'll only have a fraction of the hours to devote to it. I was working on Ruby 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. Now my wife is our primary breadwinner and I'm generally playing Mr. Mom to our 3 year old son (cool kid, bad career move!) I'll probably get to work about 20 hours a week on Ultrafoot.
  

So as I collect my thoughts and determine a plan for how to proceed (and do website maintenance, and enter receipts, and hang curtains, and a billion other things I've been neglecting...) I've asked you to dive into the animatic with the intention of adding gags, sprucing the thing up and generally giving a fresh perspective to the project.

Temris Ridge remains the Queen of the Immediate Assignment Turnaround! Two hours after my request, she turned in this...

She spruced up the segment where Ultrafoot is being adored by the cheering throng, and added a funny gag to the ending. What do you guys think of the end? I like it, but I've also been looking forward to animating Ultrafoot dancing to that weird beat-box ending of the song. Temris' suggestion is more narative whereas mine is no more than a fun bit of (possibly gratuitous) animation. You don't much of an impression from the hideous storyboard, but my intention is that it'll be really fun to watch him dance.

More soon!

The Sad Reality for Ultrafoot

I'm getting back into Ultrafoot after yet another long hiatus...

The whole problem is I want to be an animator. You know, really. I want to develop my craft. Every professional project I work on is always so rushed, budgets are small, schedules are tight, and there's always an attitude of producing work that's just good enough and moving quickly on.

I've been watching too many classic Disney films and reading too much by and about the animators of that era lately. They had the opportunity to work a character and a scene through to it's full potential. I'm finding my research into that period both exhilarating and depressing. I just don't see my freelancer lifestyle ever allowing for that same exploration of the craft.

So it occurs to me the only place I'm going to find that kind of opportunity is with side projects like Ultrafoot. Without being beholden to a budget or schedule, I'm able to try new things and put a little more effort in. The terrible down side is that any paying work that comes along must push Ultrafoot aside. There are people I know, able to pass over lucrative work in order to persue the projects they want to work on. I admire that a great deal, and I really wish I could be more like that, but that's just not me. I need to live with some comfort and security and I can hardly believe I've been able to attain as much of that as I have while doing what I love to do for a living.

And so Ultrafoot has dragged on for a year and a half so far, and it's far from finished, as you can see. In fact, eachtime I return to it after a break, I'm tempted to overhaul the whole project! I'll try not to take too many steps backward this time. I'm highly motivated to make some progress, I have no other work lined up at the moment and I have some talented people interested in helping out. Watch for updates!

Scene 3 and scene 7 with finished animation

Scenes 3 and 7 have been tweened, cleaned and painted.

Colors

Scenes 1 through 8, rough

Just a little progress update. Sorry it's a bit hard to tell what's going on sometimes with the rough animation. That's going to be a problem until things get cleaned up a bit.

Meet Ultrafoot!

This guy was definitely everybody's favorite.
He's cute. I think I was looking for something a little more "out there". Something even kind of bizarre. But this kid is definitely a lot of fun to draw!
I wanted to draw a lot more poses for you to review, but this will have to do for now. Tell me if you have any thoughts before I start animating him! (I see I forgot the lapels on his coat on one drawing, and the stripes on his tie in all cases, so any thoughts besides those)

Scenes 1 through 5 rough

I got to work doing rough animation on the early scenes without Ultrafoot in them.

Two More Ultrafoots

Ultrafoots is the correct plural. I looked it up.

These are based on earlier designs I'm not entirely ready to abandon.

New Character Designs

Alright! I've finally had some time to spare for Ultrafoot, and I hope it lasts. I'm really gung-ho to make some progress. I'm dying to just start animating, but obviously I've GOT to figure out what he looks like. Damn it! It's time to nail that down. WAY past time, actually.

So what do you think of these guys?

Scroll through earlier posts and see if there's anything that speaks to you. I'm sold on the school uniform concept, but everything else is pretty much up in the air. Generally, I'm leaning toward skinny over fat, and I think he's got to have those glasses. I'm still trying for that ugly but cute at the same time idea.

I want to take comments and start refining a final design.

Poor Neglected Ultrafoot!

It was my fervent hope to finish Ultrafoot before the new year. Man! I didn't even get close! A new son and a supervisor position on a TV series (check out The Mr. Men Show airing on the Cartoon Network this spring!) left no time at all for Ultrafoot. I haven't touched it for months!

There has, however been some progress. I've recruited some guys interested in helping out. Jessica Buuck has come on as a recently graduated intern. She enthusiastically provided this background painting of the thug's hideout...
...before being called away to complete her school work and graduate on time. It's a gorgeous painting! And it sets a high standard for the look of the rest of the cartoon I hope we can maintain. If we're lucky, nobody will hire Jessica for a while and she can continue to help out.