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!