Hey, let's keep on a roll with last week's themes! Children, treasure, dragons, dying.
Yeah. Woo death! Woo!
Welcome back to Scribble Kibble, your weekly source of animation tidbits. Yes, whether
you're learning about animation or you want to watch animations or you want to listen
to the smooth saucy sidle of my silly voice, grab a snack or a drink, sit down and enjoy.
Or listen on your headphones while doing an intense workout. You decide!
So the theme of today's animation is very similar to last week's Reversal of the Heart,
but this animation is rougher in terms of the artwork. It's called Unicorn's Fortune.
And it's your fortune to decide whether or not you want to watch it before I explain
it. Here's the link.
It's funny how mad everyone gets at the ending. How could the unicorn choose the crown over
its family! Bad! Bad unicorn! But this is a classic story of choice and consequence.
The choices we make and the results they will have – it's not always so obvious until
it's too late.
So guess what! This is animated in GIMP, which is a free drawing program. Now, even though
this is a finished animation, the interesting thing is it's still pretty rough. While these
gray lines may look like shading, they are actually the construction lines for the final
artwork. You see stuff like this when an animator is planning the motion of something so that
it looks natural when the final black line is put down. Usually the construction lines
are made up of circles and straight lines. Like a skeleton the animator can follow. When
the final lines are done, the animator deletes the construction lines. For some reason this
time they chose to leave them in. So we get to look at them and see how it works.
There are some noticeable time saving measures in the animation too, like – sliding a still
image from one spot to the next, copying the same head for this walk cycle instead of drawing
a new one each time, and animating mostly in black and white. When your project has
a deadline but includes things like animating an Eastern style dragon flying, you have to
figure out what you can do to save time elsewhere.
If you take a look at Unicorn's Fortune and some of the animator's other videos, it's
pretty clear they are very good at building and using anatomy. So even though the unicorns
and the dragon are moving all over the place through different angles and perspectives,
their skeletal structure stays consistent. This is called staying on model. It's something
I'm terrible at, so don't look at my art to get better at it. Every time I draw something
its legs are longer or shorter than they were the last time, or something is just different.
Oh! Making a character reference sheet, or a 3D object you can turn around in your hand
for seeing what it looks like at different angles will help you stay on model. And drawing
rough construction lines. That'll help you too. It's just ways to make sure your character
looks the same and has the same patterns and markings and muscles from whichever way you
look at it and no matter how it's moving.
The animator of Unicorn's Fortune has a slew of mini animation tutorials. I've put the
playlist and a few of the most useful-slash-interesting ones below. In terms of animation their strongest
points are character flow and anatomy, so if those are your weak spots take a look.
Thanks for watching. Tune in next week for more Scribble Kibble!