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Welcome to Scribble Kibble! Wait, wait. Welcome to Scribble Kibble, a show about animation
from the perspective of an animator. I’m going to talk about one of my animations this
time because I don’t want you to hate me yet for ruining the things you love.
Speaking of love, this episode’s focus is on Love Is An Open Door, which people have
described as “cringey” and “cute.” Cringey because it involves the hated and
feared show My Little Pony and the Disney movie Frozen. If you can look past that...
heh… it’s cute. And look at all these video game references. If you want to watch
it before I disassemble it into itty bitty pieces and show you what it looks like behind
the scenes, I put a link to it around here somewhere.
I think maybe down there. Maybe. I don't know. You can find it. I have confidence in you.
So what does it take to make an animation that mimics the show style of My Little Pony:
Friendship is Magic? For an experienced animator, a completed 2 minute and 40 second video breaks
down to 185 hours of work.
The backgrounds only took 25 hours because I reused a lot of pieces from other projects
to save time.
So for every minute of animation, the animator spends 60 hours of work. That’s longer than
a week at a full time job. That’s - well, I don’t have to explain it, you can have
this magical experience for yourself! Plug your headphones into your favorite music playing
device, download the song, “Love Is An Open Door,” and listen to it for 8 days without
sleeping.
I just had to prove to myself I could copy the show style like everyone else, didn’t
I?
I took this project on as a commission. It was to be a surprise gift for Ink Rose, the
person who drew up the storyboard for the whole video. The storyboard was sent to me
in secret and I based the whole animation off of it. So except for this one spot I cut
for time, the finished product is pretty true to the original boards. I didn't add a whole
lot in there. Just gotta stick to the boards and get it done.
The first thing I worked on was building the characters. Each character is a puppet made
of tons and tons of pieces that you can change and move around. It makes animating relatively
fast, clean, and inexpensive. So at first I thought I might download a royalty-free
fanmade puppet to work off of, but in the end I just... I just didn’t trust them to
do what I wanted them to do. Some of them are actually over complicated. It would take
me just as long to figure out how to animate someone else’s model as it would to just
draw my own. I mean look. Look inside the guts of this thing. It’s a mess.
When you see an animation made with puppets THIS is what’s going on underneath the surface!
Just picture that next time you see a pony animation. That's what's going on underneath
that.
Ponies are built in a stack of layers, and if you organize them poorly from the start,
your animation is going to turn out wrong and it's going to be hard to work with. It
just won't work right. And that's especially true with hair, because hair needs... you
can't just, you can't just draw the hair as it is. It has to have multiple pieces so it's
bouncy when it's animated. I mean, if your hair was one massive strand, of course it
would be stiff like cardboard! I notice that in a lot of fan pony animations: stiff hair,
overall stiff movements, and twitching ears. Do the ponies in the show constantly twitch
their ears? No.
If you want to copy a show, studying the movements of the critters on screen is key. It’s not
just about drawing the art the same way. This is animation! Animation is movement! Movement
is life!
Love Is An Open Door is animated using only three perspectives. The front, the side, and
the three quarters (which is the space between front and side). I did throw in a back perspective
at the last minute because I couldn’t get away without it due to this balcony shot.
I could have animated them going into the tower from the side, but the balcony scene
- it was just worth it to draw that back perspective so I wouldn’t have to animate the mouths
singing for that part.
There’s also a sitting pose and a standing pose. Which, I didn’t bother to draw the
standing pose in Illustrator. I fudged it with a bunch of already finished pieces from
other poses.
But once the bases were done, I had to make costumes for all of these different situations.
And costumes turn out to be really interesting because you have to reference the storyboard,
the real material the storyboard might be based off of, and then boil all of those things
down to a simple, clean design that can realistically be animated... on the body of a horse. [laughs]
Ok ok, that’s enough about character building. I’ll save it for a tutorial. So, backgrounds.
Yeah. Not much to say about the backgrounds, really. It’s a lot of drawing and inventing
things to look at. And since the storyboards were pretty bleak in terms of backgrounds,
it was a lot of imagining work to think of something to put back there that's a little
more interesting.
I’m most proud of the first one because I spent a lot of time on that since I knew
it would be on screen for so long. Everybody's going to have to stare at it forever. Originally
there would have been strawberries and marshmallows on the fondue plate, some more details like
that in the room, ponies walking around behind the glass, but no, I couldn’t take it anymore
I just... I just couldn’t listen to an analogy about love and doors anymore. Close the door.
No more open doors! No more love! You’re letting the bugs in! CLOSE IT ALREADY!
I don’t like this background. There’s too many clashing colors, the depth is all
wrong, and the ground is really weird. Blech. And why are there bananas on the carpet here?
And look at this wonky head movement. Wait, slow it down. Slower.
Broken back, broken nose, broken noses, broken hair, Illustrator pattern lines, Paper Mario,
flickering design, depthless night sky. Yes folks, we’ve got it all! Ooh, ohh, there’s
that flickering again. And that’s what happens when you don’t convert Flash pen tool lines
to fills. Man I wish I’d noticed those earlier. That’s... that's going to bother me now.
I ruined the animation for myself.
I don’t want to think about it. Let’s go on a relaxing visual journey through the
raw animation files.
[music]
Animating this sort of thing is easy but time consuming. All you are doing really is picking
which pieces of the pony show up and where they need to move to. For someone like me
who is used to drawing frame by frame, used to drawing individual pictures for every single
thing you see, animating puppets like this feels soul crushingly confining. True, I mean,
you can draw new pieces if you don’t have what you need. And that's what puppet animators
always tell me, "Well yeah, you can draw the new piece and it's fun." But to me drawing
puppets is not the same. It’s the difference between making a sculpture out of factory-produced,
perfectly molded pieces and making a sculpture out of an infinitely malleable lump of dough.
The craftsmanship of sculpting that lump of dough is what I love about animation. It doesn't
look always as clean as the factory stuff, but it's got character. [laughs] It's got
character. And if you know what you're doing, you can make something amazing that no factory
in the world could make.
So by the time I’d finished 99 hours of tweening puppet parts, I had sunk way too
much time into the project to do the swirly transitions the storyboard called for and
to add sound effects and fine tune the animation. So I was happy to that see Josh Scorcher added
scene transitions and sound effects after I gave him the completed file. And he added
a joke to the end after the credits too.
And that’s how Love Is An Open Door was made!
That’s it for today. Come back next time for something I didn’t make that is not
pony-related. Is there even anybody here who doesn’t like ponies? How did you sit through
all of that just now? How did you... what? Anybody? Uh… hm. I think everybody's gone.
Shoot. Next time I have to remember to tell them to visit my website and leave a tip on
Patreon or PayPal.