Inspiration: ANM201 – Week 12

This may sound strange, but I get some of my best ideas while in the shower. Perhaps it's the mindless activity of washing that allows my mind to wander, or maybe it's the invigorating spray of the water, either way something brilliant inevitably comes to me there. Yesterday it was an idea for animating a scene from my Sophomore film project – which will be my final project in this class. Originally, the film was to have been hand-drawn but after estimating production time at nearly a year, I knew that was out of the question. My adviser suggested doing the animation in After Effects with the puppet pin tool. That's a great idea, but it veers heavily away from the look I wanted with hand-drawn and it's rough boiling holds. Of course I can simply pre-compose a boiling hold for all the parts of the character in AE, and them animate them with rotation and puppet pins, but the motion will still be smooth from keyframe to key frame. That's when inspiration hit me. To achieve the “jerkiness” of hand-drawn animation what I'm going to do is “jump cut” the pieces to move them. In other words, for each drawing of an arm moving up, I'm going to insert a separate pre-composed boiling hold of the arm. This should give me the roughness I'm looking for. I can then use the puppet pin tool to shape the generic pieces into whatever form I need at the time. We'll give this a try, see how it looks, and more importantly – how long it takes. Next semester is going to go very fast and I want to be done with the film in time for its premier...