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: