Tournament experiments

The title image is the first shot in a short test I'm working on. I'm going to make a 30 second ish test animation of an excerpt from episode 1 of the Pleasure Island tournament series I've been writing about in the last few posts. The goal is to see how long it takes, whether it's watchable, and whether I feel like I can make the series. Working at the pace of my usual style, it would take years. Like, actual whole multiple years.

My first idea was to try something between an animatic and a comic, with some animation, in greyscale. I had this animation below with half the frames on 6s (1 drawing per 6 frames) but it didn't look like something I'd watch in a video. So I added a drawing in between all the main poses:

This is animated on 4s (1 drawing per 4 frames at 25fps), but with no colour or shadows/highlights.

I've seen some nice fights on 4s in anime, it's certainly faster than a mix of 1s and 2s which is what I would do normally.

I'm now wondering if I should stick with the greyscale though. Colour selection isn't all that time consuming, it's more shadows and highlights which add time (you have to animate those too).

Alot of shows will have no shadows/highlights on characters in the distance or on fast action like the above gif but then have them in close ups, so that's something else I could try. So I might end up colouring it.

I've sketched out storyboards but this is the only finished shots I have to show so far.

More broadly, I want to find a form to make cartoons more frequently, as I feel my style has atrophied somewhat and it takes me too long to make things. I want to abandon rig-based animation, or at least dial it right down, and do more simple but expressive animation and also I want to do more action.

My job has been extended again, so no one will be billed on April 1st as they've asked me to work in April. Thanks again for your patience, it's been almost 6 months now. If you haven't read the last post or posts I'm drawing storyboards on a movie for Netflix. When I started the job it was only supposed to be for a month but it's now 4 months and counting.