Here’s a new short and cute animation called Banana Cat.
The song is catchy, be careful.
I’ve linked it below so you can watch it.
The creation of the Banana Cat animation is straightforward.
Brianne Drouhard invented the character in 2005.
Somehow it ended up being the focus of this video more than ten years later.
Parry Gripp did the song.
Brianne created an animatic for the video.
An animatic is basically a rough animation, since there is a lot more movement than a
storyboard, which tends to be still images.
The final animation is by SmallBu studio.
And I know I’m pronouncing that last name right because the logo is a ghost.
Haha!
I’m so smart.
After the animation was finished Parry Gripp made a final version of the song.
Combine the two, upload to the internet, done.
The animation style is simple: textured brown lines with solid fill colors and no shading.
There are occasionally smooth lines, like on this mountain and the text here.
Changing the line style is as easy as picking a new brush or pencil in Toon Boom, so I’m
guessing that’s the program for the final animation.
The animatic is Toon Boom.
It’s funny how the only two detailed backgrounds are almost the same in the final as they are
in the animatic.
Almost.
Banana Cat is a good chance to see what changes between an animatic and a final animation,
especially in a case where the artists doing the final animation are different than the
ones doing a rough cut.
While the general sense of timing and what is happening on screen are the same, SmallBu
added a lot more personality to Banana Cat’s movements.
For example, the running animation at the beginning: not only is Banana Cat more floppy
and bouncy in general, we get this squishy roll leading into the run.
When Banana Cat pushes the old banana into the volcano, in the animatic that’s it.
But in the final version the animators added a semi-crazed stare at the audience afterwards.
This is actually a clever way to make something happen on screen, because without that Banana
Cat is sitting still for too long looking at nothing.
Oh, and they also added these flies buzzing around brown banana.
There are lots of little additions like that.
The sorts of things you’ll get depend on who is doing the final animation - whether
they feel like the cartoon needs more cute, more silliness, more weird, more creepy.
One thing to pay attention to as far as the animatic goes is that when a scene is really
important, the person doing the rough animation draws a lot of key poses.
The run cycle isn’t fleshed out at all.
But the parts at the end with the approaching cat, and the merge into the milkshake, those
scenes are very detailed.
Especially this part here, this is more like an animator drawing key poses so a different
animator can come in and draw the pictures in between to bring the thing to life.
Because of that, when you compare these scenes there isn’t much change in the movement.
SmallBu added a little bounce to the left on the approach, but other than that the final
animation follows the script closely.
So when one animator is giving another an animatic to work off of, it’s the rough
draft animator’s job to make sure the most important scenes are very clear.
Yet it’s also important to leave room for the final animators to make improvements.
And for the final animators, they need to follow the script, but they also need to recognize
where things can be improved.
That’s all for today.
I hope this gave you a little insight on how different animators work together to create
a final product.