♦ Skate Attack ♦ Shot 4 ♦ Animation Breakdown ♦

Alright, here we are, welcome to the animation rambling and a very short introduction to our various process breakdowns!! In the future, I'm planning to film these horizontally, and they will be much longer and much more detailed than this, focused on full animations, not necessarily just one shot.

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✦ BACKGROUNDS ✦

Whenever I start an animation, I always choose or make a sound first and go through where I want the shots to be. Sometimes this placement may change later on, but generally I try to tune everything with the music to the best of my abilities at the very beginning as I do some of my background animations in After Effects and import them into TV Paint.

I usually start by really roughly sketching out the main key poses, and when I say roughly, I mean roughly. I have unfortunately not been gifted with a talent in sketching whatsoever, and I'm quite certain I couldn't make uglier sketches than I do if I tried. However, I do always put sketches in the right positions and roughly the right perspective, as this is important for the backgrounds painting. I like to sketch out animations first and paint backgrounds later, just because it really allows me to focus on dynamic poses and movements first, and form backgrounds around those poses accordingly.

It's also important to note that I export my backgrounds as PNGs in sections (front, middle, back, etc.)

✦ BACKGROUND ANIMATION ✦

Whenever there is a need for any multiplane camera shots, I immediately leave TV Paint and enter the lands of good old After Effects. As an entirely personal preference, I really do not like how TV Paint treats cameras and multiplane especially. After Effects, on the other hand, has a really easy to understand way of achieving this effect with more control and a much more friendly interface.

The process is very simple: Import PNGs in After Effects, add your camera, make all the PNGs 3D layers and spread them out through your scene according to which part of the background is closer to the camera. So essentially, road = 1st in line, sky = last in line. I then move the camera just slightly through the scene to create the movement I want the final shot to have.

In case you don't have access to After Effects, you can also pretty much achieve this same exact effect in Blender, which is a totally free 3D program.

✦ SKETCH ✦

The ugly sketching phase continues 😚

I always do my best to treat sketches as very fast captures of the movement instead of refined drawings. There is nothing worse than spending like 5 hours perfecting all the little intricate details on your animation sketch only to run it once and see that everything looks clunky and nothing is smooth. Animation is first and foremost an art of movement, and I believe it shouldn't necessarily be treated the same as illustration (at least not in the rough sketching phase haha, leave that for your linework, or second sketch pass).

I use this sketch phase to simply refine the main keyframes I'll use to create my movement. I try my best to really not bother with the little details, rather focus on the entire movement as a whole — Head arcs, jump arcs, positions of the legs...

✦ KEYFRAMES ANIMATION ✦

I would advise everyone, in case you do have a tendency to sketch as messily as I do and especially if you're just starting to animate, to not immediately go to the linework phase but to create another sketch pass where you'll refine your details (hair, eyes, secondary things like dragging of the fabric, etc.). It will help you not get lost a lot, and in general it will help you create a lot smoother, more clean movement.

I'm usually in a time crunch, so I tend to immediately go to my keyframe linework animation and just refine my details there (which leads to a lot of erasing and fixing later on, but since I work on these on my own, this isn't much of an issue).

You should always try to make your keyframes look as neat as possible. These are the frames that are going to affect how your inbetweens look and how your animation comes across in general, so really spend your time refining those features. Here I had Rick quite far away in the frame and going through a pretty fast movement, so I had a lot less to worry about, as a lot of the fine details get lost in the movement here.

✦ RICK/POSTMAN LINEWORK ✦

This phase just involves the inbetweening. The main magic behind smooth movements is making sure all your lines are packed neatly between the onion skins. They shouldn't move around and about, ESPECIALLY if your movement is very slow and the lines are close together, it will show in the end result immediately.

✦ WATER ANIMATION ✦

Whenever there are liquids or fires or any like that involved, I always try to simplify it to one color and animate the general movement first and then focus on the little shines and everything else we have going on there,

✦ FIRE ANIMATION ✦

The hardest part 😭 you guys have no idea how much I admire 2D VFX animators, they are magicians and I wish I understood how their magical brains work haha. I still consider myself pretty new to animating fires, explosions, smoke, and similar simulations, so you'll see me scrapping the entire idea once to try a totally different type of fire and play around with a bunch of effects to really achieve what I want here.

✦ BASE COLOR AND LIGHT ✦

I always try to clean up my lines well enough to make the paint bucket coloring very easy and straight forward. I usually set the lines down to 50-60% opacity and color the base colors as they are in my basic reference files, and then I color correct the whole animation with Sliders to better match the backgrounds. For the shadows/light, I use a combination of TV Paint's toon shading and manual shading where needed. Typically, if the light is more basic like it is here, toon shading will be the entire process to achieving these slight highlights, while if the light is more direct, then I'll animate shadows and light manually and combine it with toon shading to achieve the best result.

✦ FINAL ✦

And that's about it!! :D The last thing I always do is throw my entire animation in After Effects to overlay it with a bunch of effects to create this old VHS effect!

There are so many little details and steps about each of these stages I could talk about for hours and hours, but I'll dive deeper into certain details within the future posts here ♡