A huge component of storyboarding is to use the camera position and angle to tell the story you want to tell (or that you’re paid to tell…). No angle or position is bad by itself. But every camera choice you make influences how the story unfolds. There’s a time and a place for dynamic camera angles. Maybe right in the middle of an action sequence. But there’s also a place for what some may refer to as flat staging. Flat doesn’t mean boring. It often brings clarity and a sense of calm to a scene, a moment for the audience to understand where things are, often used in establishing shots. A mistake junior story artists often make is to overdo the dynamic shots. They can be very powerful, but use them wisely. As always, there’s exceptions to every rules. Sometimes, subverting the expectations of an audience by using an unusual camera angle can bring a sequence to life. Try and experiment! -Norm @grizandnorm #100tuesdaytipsbook #100tuesdaytips #tuesdaytips #arttips #arttutorials #DynamicVSflat
It sucks big time that this virus is going around and we’re all isolated in our homes. But this is a greater opportunity than any to engage in online courses. Many creators are turning their paid courses for free in light of this and I want to share some that I’ve found. (If you got any, feel free to share the links in the comments!)
The whole film took me altogether about 5 grueling months (usually 10-12hours a day) to do. I often felt my butt was going to grow into the chair I usually sat at.
Please note that this was simply my way of doing my film to achieve the soft-shaded style I wanted; there are many other ways of doing this and some are a lot faster with different results~! :)
You can see my storyboard animatic here (although the original had music, but like I mentioned, my placeholder music was by Joe Hisaishi, you know, Miyazaki’s composer, so it’s not really legal to upload it).
This tut differs a bit from my dA version, because tumblr lets me put the combination of gifs and jpegs :D.
Here’s a book that will really help you start animating:
Ack, I completely forgot to add that before you guys do backgrounds and animation and after you have a satisfactory storyboard animatic, it’s good to come up with a colour-script for your film so you know how your film feels with which colours, etc.
Someone asked about this a little while ago (on a tumblr msg), and I’ve been chewing on it. I want to say first that I’m not an instructor, and I’m not super good at explaining things. If you want some really good animation resources I highly recommend these two books:
Cartoon Animation - Preston Blair The Animator’s Survival Kit - Richard Williams
They are both very good
(and they’re on amazon for way less than I bought them for!)
, but if you can only get one, and you have no animation experience, I suggest the second. It’s absolutely huge and has a very detailed explanations and diagrams for basically everything you could think of, starting from the very basic of animation principles.
Soooo animation tips? I guess the first and most important thing I learned when I went to school, is that more drawings don’t necessarily make better animations. I always thought that was basically it. The difference between beautiful feature films, and not so great Saturday morning cartoons? More drawings. Right? That might be part of it, that’s what makes it smoother, but it’s not the secret. The most important parts of making an animation look good are:
1. poses. 2. timing.
In other words, what you draw and how you get there: They should be interesting! Spending time on that is more important than spending time on making lots of frames.
Now…. I started writing up a bunch of stuff about keyframes, breakdowns, squash and stretch…. and it’s just this giant rabbit hole of explanations. And I’m sure there are a lot of YouTube videos that already exist and are great for all of those things. So… short version: are you making short silly GIFs? Then you want to see how few frames you can get away with and still have it look okay. If you put your poses too far apart, they will look like your character is teleporting. If you make them too similar and / or close together, it will be boring.
This is 5 frames:
lil unicorn guy: 5 frames is the minimum for a “boiling line” that looks good (the kind of line style that you see in Ed, Edd n Eddy, for example). The heart and the eye are wobbling around just enough to be interesting, and the tail is the one piece that’s really moving. If the whole drawing was done with a boiling line, it would probably look better, but that is so much more work and this looks okay!
This is 2 frames:
cutiefly toot toot: the body moves a little bit (but doesn’t change), the wings move a bit more, and the feet don’t move at all, they’re like an anchor. it’s only two frames! but it looks okay too.
This is 27 frames (but don’t freak out):
hugs wolves: so the bodies don’t move. pink tail: 8 frames. purple tail: 9 frames. heart: 5 frames. the moving parts all move a little bit differently in terms of distance and frame count. They don’t start and stop exactly the same time. That variation makes it interesting. But when you break it down, there aren’t actually that many different drawings to it.
TL;DR: Don’t move everything the same amount. Variety is interesting! See how few drawings you can get away with. Or not! If you don’t want to. And most importantly, just make stuff, even if you don’t think it looks good.
So I wrote and animated this tutorial for people working on my short film Bothered, but I figured it would be useful for all animators, particularly beginners. I borrowed some of these concepts from this awesome packet done by Jon Hooper and Michel Gagne, which is also pretty great!
