Hikari's Dilemma - Shot 12 - Slippin' In

Update: Added one more frame to the insertion.

If it weren't obvious from, uh, this project I've been working on for months, I'm a HUGE Evangelion fan. So, I wanted something special to celebrate the release of the final Evangelion movie! I don't know when I'll be able to see it, and I pray that I'll be able to avoid spoilers till then... 

I'm extremely proud of this next shot from Hikari's Dilemma (Newgrounds / Vimeo / Youtube). Unlike 99% of my animations, this one is actually 100% traditional, frame by frame animation! No puppet trickery here! 

I can't take full credit for this, Cyberunique drew the first 3 frames (of the initial spread), but everything else was all me. When I started out, determined to do some traditional animation, I'd intended on having it only be 6 or 7 frames. Oops, turns out it needed 17 frames. 

Here's the frame from the original comic that I started with:

Maybe it was hubris talking, but I felt like I could handle the frame by frame for this. It's an extreme closeup (meaning there's not a lot to draw), and the motion would be relatively simple.

Hours of agonizing later, I had some decent looking lineart.

This took... uh... a while. For one, making sure everything moved and warped correctly between frames was a huge challenge. And if I ever wanted to change anything, that was another huge undertaking. After Effects does most of the heavy lifting for me, by calculating the in-betweens (before I tweak then), but I didn't have that luxury here. Which meant A LOT of redrawing. I also had some absurd levels of line boil. 

But eventually, I got something I was pretty happy with, which meant it was time to move on to the flats.

Maybe it's the colors I pick, but everytime I work on animation, I never think the flat colors look that great... Even though I've seen anime and other animations that look fantastic, using only flats. 

Luckily, this isn't only flats! Doing shading is still a little slice of hell for me, but I think I pulled off a good look. 

Like the initial line art, I had to fight against too much line boil, but eventually I wound up with  something decent. I surprised myself by how much I liked the look of the condom highlight I did.

And then, it was just time for some special effects for the final animation.

How well the wetness came out also surprised the heck out of me. All in all, I'm super pleased with the look of my first traditionally animated shot!

As always, I will probably tweak it a bit before the animation is finished. There are still bits I'm unhappy with... but for now, it's time to move on... and figure out how I'm going to watch Rebuild of Evangelion :|| : 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon A Time.