The challenge with creating the animation for the Freelance Animation School website was that it had to look like ‘Classical’ 2D (hand drawn) animation to fit the school’s traditions of teaching, although it was to be produced entirely in Flash to save on resources. Initially I thought I could employ the use of ‘puppet’ animation in Flash to make more job easier, but the tests weren’t cutting it.
Initial concepts for website banners
My ‘hybrid’ of Classical and Flash animation basically became ‘paperless classical animation’. This allowed me to get more expressive ‘squash & stretch’ action out of the characters. I drew my ruff poses for each ‘scene’ straight into Flash using a Wacom tablet, working from my thumbnail storyboards, and using the character model sheets provided by FAS as a guide for the construction of the characters.
Ruff poses for animation
The next challenge came in the ‘clean up’ animation process, where the ruff poses had to be traced in Flash to create the final lines that are seen. A fair amount of coordination between ‘hand to eye to brush-cursor’ was needed to get a good line style for the clean up drawings… and also a fair amount of tweaking.
Wire Frame revealing individual layers in the scene
Clean Up drawings coloured, and yet to be coloured
Inbetween drawings were done during the clean up process (creating some fluidity in the character movement), without any ruff inbetweens to base them on, instead using the ‘onion skin’ tool in Flash to help to quickly draw them in.
Keys and inbetween drawings shown in sequence using the 'onion skin' tool
A few FX and Background environments were added…
…and it all turned out nicely!
Many thanks to FAS and madMinute for constructive feedback and support, and to Paul Templeman for the 3D animated banner, also to feature on the new FAS website:)
- by Kris Brown
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