3 answers
Candys
Student
Horizon City, Texas
3
Questions
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What are the steps in creating your own animation?
I was recently inspired by how animations seem more detailed and animated. I'd notice how in most cartoons, their mouth flaps seem like they're pronouncing each word clearly. And the storyline for most cartoons inspire me to pursue animation. I want to bring characters to life and tell stories. #animation #art #artist #design #story #webseries #disney
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3 answers
Ryan I
Animation
6
Answers
New York, New York
Updated
Ryan’s Answer
In terms of 2D character animation, I’ve found that creating re-useable “puppets” is great way to save time on redrawing frames while still allowing for fluid movement and storytelling. In other words, I’ll create each moveable part of the character like the head, torso, arms, legs, hands, feet. Then add more angles to these individual parts so that the character is able to do things like a three quarter turn or face different directions. The benefit of doing this is that it really allows you to give the character life, while minimizing the amount of time you need to spend redrawing. So even if you draw those individual parts once, you can still do complicated movements like a full walk cycle or whatever your character might do.
If you’re interested in lip sync and speech movement, using certain programs (I use Adobe Animate) will allow you to create a main mouth drawing or “symbol” and within that drawing/symbol you can have different variations of the same mouth drawing.
So when you alternate between the mouth variations, it’ll look like your character is actually talking! It sounds complicated but essentially, you can do a full on lip synced character with only having to draw around 7 mouths.
If you’re interested in lip sync and speech movement, using certain programs (I use Adobe Animate) will allow you to create a main mouth drawing or “symbol” and within that drawing/symbol you can have different variations of the same mouth drawing.
So when you alternate between the mouth variations, it’ll look like your character is actually talking! It sounds complicated but essentially, you can do a full on lip synced character with only having to draw around 7 mouths.
Kuen Summers
software
3
Answers
Oceanside, California
Updated
Kuen’s Answer
I have seen an animation done, just like a flip book of images, several images of one thing, where there are small changes to each one and they are cycled though by programed code to show the animation.
Benjamin Hall
Animator
12
Answers
Cicero, New York
Updated
Benjamin’s Answer
Hi Candys,
There are 3 main steps to creating an animation 1. Planning 2. Blocking 3. Polish/Splining. 1. The planning stage involves coming up with the scenario of the scene then getting reference footage of your action by either filming it yourself or finding it online, if it's a dangerous action then just find footage done by professionals online. Once you have your footage analyze it to observe how the motion works and adjusting by drawing out the poses I would recommend buying the book simplified drawing for planning animation to help you with this process. 2. Blocking requires you to take your planning and start applying it to your animation by laying out the important “Storytelling” poses of a character first and then adding in the other poses needed to describe the action. 3. The splining / polishing stage requires you to add in all the remaining poses needed to describe the action and then once you’ve completed all the necessary poses look through your animation again to see what could be improved on or tweaked.
There are 3 main steps to creating an animation 1. Planning 2. Blocking 3. Polish/Splining. 1. The planning stage involves coming up with the scenario of the scene then getting reference footage of your action by either filming it yourself or finding it online, if it's a dangerous action then just find footage done by professionals online. Once you have your footage analyze it to observe how the motion works and adjusting by drawing out the poses I would recommend buying the book simplified drawing for planning animation to help you with this process. 2. Blocking requires you to take your planning and start applying it to your animation by laying out the important “Storytelling” poses of a character first and then adding in the other poses needed to describe the action. 3. The splining / polishing stage requires you to add in all the remaining poses needed to describe the action and then once you’ve completed all the necessary poses look through your animation again to see what could be improved on or tweaked.