What’s up everyone?
Thank you Antony C for inspiring this opening to Scribble Kibble.
I’m making this episode late at night.
I’m a bit… unfocused.
Scattered.
Should be interesting.
The featured animation is Welcome to Hell, and here it is in all its glory.
You know, it feels unfinished story-wise.
Not like a cliffhanger, but like somebody is talking and they start to trail off on
what they’re saying and they get quiet and kinda… mmm.
But surprisingly animator Erica Wester and the fans of Welcome to Hell are extremely
active around this animation even three years later, so there are tons of answers to be
had.
After reading about how the current iteration of the story came to be I can appreciate it
as it is.
It’s certainly better than the Mephistopheles-centric one where we barely get to know the other
characters.
Current story focuses on the relationship between Sock and Jonathan.
Unlike the majority of the animations on Scribble Kibble, Welcome to Hell is drawn on paper.
It’s colored digitally and there’s the digital backgrounds in the second scene, and
a little bit of the animation program TVPaint hiding in there, but everything else is paper.
There are all of your pencil lines.
So.
You want to animate on paper.
You’ve got two options: stack papers together and flip and roll through them with your fingers
to check your work as you draw OR use a light table that shines light through previous and
next drawings so you can see where to put your lines.
Here’s my ghetto table, which is a sheet of plexiglass on top of some crates, the upper
one which I shoved a desk lamp into.
At the low low price of excruciating back pain from standing bent over that flat surface
for more than few hours.
If you’re animating on paper most people use sheets that have holes in them that fit
to a peg bar so the papers stay aligned as you draw.
If you’re only animating for fun, you don’t really need that.
You can animate with regular sheets of paper.
Either way, hand work is not for the faint of heart.
If you learned to animate digitally and never touched a pencil test in your life, I suggest
trying the flipping and rolling method.
It forces you to be a better artist.
Stop relying on the light table, or the onion skin for everything and actually flip through
your frames, then go to the blank canvas with no distracting lines and draw your character
fresh.
It’s painful to do at first: you feel blind without the onion skin.
(See also: Traditional Habits for Digital Animators by Toniko Pantoja)
But soon you will realize all that you lost by relying on it.
Ahem.
Anyway!
Welcome to Hell benefits a lot from the unclean pencil sketches, first because there’s no
easy way to cheat posing with a digital onion skin, and second because the pencil lines
leave a lot of interesting texture on the drawings, versus that flat look you get with,
say, a typical Flash cartoon.
I’m sort of… reading through the production blog as I talk here.
Every so often Erica mentions the daily struggles of an independent animator.
It’s all totally true.
When you’re in college, your job is to make a senior thesis film, which is what Welcome
to Hell is.
That’s all you do.
Then you graduate and don’t have those loans anymore - in fact, you have to pay them off.
So you try to make an original cartoon, but most of your time is spent doing art that
makes money so you can live day to day.
Ahahah.
But yes, Welcome to Hell two is in the works.
There’s a Patreon for it, and the production blog, all that song and dance.
Plenty of secrets to dig up if you know where to look.
I’m going to leave this episode short and sweet.
Come back next week for more of this little animation show called Scribble Kibble.