I have been very busy the past couple weeks, unfortunately not on my personal animation. On slow weeks such as this, rather than trying to stretch out a few scattered drawings, I will go into the techniques I am using to make the film. First I’d like to go over a recent addition to Photoshop, the timeline. It seemed rather odd to add a timeline but looking at the whole scope of Adobe’s product line, Photoshop is fast becoming the hub of Adobe’s catalog. The program you need to get any type of media done, which makes sense, the essential element of any piece of a graphic, film or software is the layout of the frame.
Down to the basics, why not Flash or After Effects?
An early shot with Flash on a 3D background
The obvious answer to most digital animation these days is Flash, but Flash is vector based, which produces a distinctive clean, sharp style. Achieving a rough, dirty look in Flash is tough especially in animations with only a few elements. In addition, if you are looking to go back and edit a vector drawing you are presented with a mess of shapes and no opacity controlled eraser. Overlapping elements have to be done at the layer level and exporting individual Flash pieces to other programs is not easy. As I have recently discovered outputting Quicktime files from Flash projects can mess-up timing, leaving elements such as voice over a frame or two off.
After Effects a sandbox where frames in a sequence can be manipulated at will, with one exception. Creating content in After Effects is no small task. Text, 3D layers, solid shapes are no problem but try making a character with any level of detail or a painted background. There is a way to draw in After Effects but its more a cheat then a day to day function. Pull up a Matte and draw, then use it over-top a solid layer, it works but why build image authoring into a program that hasn’t had it before.
Painting over a storyboard in Photoshop
This is where adding basic timeline functionality to Photoshop makes sense. Above CS3, layers in Photoshop can now be timed out outputted as sequenced .PSD files for any use. Animation in Photoshop becomes the same as on paper. Draw the keyframes, in-between it, and then… Well here’s the catch. You could finish an animation in Photoshop and send it out but Photoshop has no way of finishing off the animation; easily re-timing the sequence, bulk composting, and audio.
How is this useful information? Simple, I cannot stand scanning frames but I love hand drawn animation. With Photoshop and After Effects a hand drawn look is easy to achieve, yes you definitely need a tablet but considering the quality to price ratio of Wacom tablets, there is almost no reason not to buy a tablet. Two pieces of advice when buying a tablet. One, get a mid sized tablet, I have a large 6″ by 11″ tablet and even working on a wide-screen monitor it is still too much.
A slow week but still some useful information to be had. The post for this week, yes I’m a week behind, will have a look at a storyboard App I’ve built for the iPhone for building animatics and storyboards anywhere.
Whitney Krape
