animation notes #1

I'm pretty baffled.

I've been inconsistently sitting down and trying to figure out how to use these animation programs.  The software came with five disks and no instructions.  Awesome.  So, I've been purchasing books and watching tutorials and reading message boards in hopes of figuring out how to work all of this stuff but nothing has totally helped me.  I can understand bits and pieces here and there and I can almost put all the information together into something cohesive and understandable but not quite.  I feel like I'm almost there but all the information I've read just kind of glosses over the basics and never really applies the instructions to actual animation.  It's pretty frustrating.

As I've mentioned, everything I used in college has been upgraded at least twice in the year since I've graduated.  I don't want to say everything I learned was obsolete but it's definitely a lot slower of a process than what the new technology is capable of.  Unfortunately, I just don't know how to use the new technology!  Just to give you a small lesson in animation, it takes approximately (depending on your frame rate) twenty-four frames to make one second of animation.  That's twenty-four drawings.  Not only that but the drawings usually need to be cleaned up/inked and then filled in with color.  So, you're basically creating a picture in three phases.  So, that equates to seventy-two images for one second of animation.  Now, image doing a two or three minute short animation.  It might not seem long but when you take into account the drawing, clean up and simple color fill (not including shading and/or highlighting), it can take weeks or months just to make that seemingly simple two minutes.  Drawing every frame by hand is called frame by frame animation.  That's what I did for my senior film.

Well, there's a new thing in Adobe Flash called symbols that can increase productivity.  You basically draw a shape that you want to animate, turn it into a symbol, and then you can work with that one shape instead of having to redraw it fifteen hundred times.  Sounds great but I don't know how to do it.  I mean, I do, but it gets complicated when you try to organize your symbols into libraries and then you can do symbols inside of symbols and you can even do movie clips inside of symbols if I'm not mistaken.  It's like a hierarchy of symbols and I don't know how to construct it correctly.

So, I sit here and sort through my books and try to to go to the software website and look up stuff on YouTube but nothing really has what I'm looking after and I'm kind of stuck.  I suppose I could do frame by frame animation but it could take me forever to produce something.  But, I actually prefer frame by frame animation.  I like the idea of putting all of myself into animating.  I've always been a bigger fan of traditional 2D animation, where you put your pencil to paper and often times literally put your blood, sweat and tears into the thing.  I know I've often sweated over a deadline, got misty when frustrated and even gave myself a paper cut or two in the process.  You put your all into it.  I think it's a bit more personal than 3D animation where you point and click.  Now, let me say, I am not against 3D animation at all.  In fact, I think it has come a long way and is amazing it its own way.  I would even like to do 3D animation in the future.  But, as of right now, I prefer 2D.  But, since it would be more economical for me to do my 2D on a computer, I'm not getting the full feel of traditional animation by paper.  Still, doing this frame by frame is as close as I can get and I'm okay with that.  It will just take forever.

One of the cons of frame by frame animation is the tendency to lose the shape of the character after a while.  You get so caught up in trying to move the thing that it might start to grow or shrink as you get far into animating.  With symbols, however, you don't lose the shape because you're working with the one image over several frames.  But, there's a certain look to symbols that you might not be able to achieve with hand drawn animation. 

I guess I'll just have to compromise.  I don't have all the free time in the world to create a cartoon just however I want.  There are many things to consider.  I'd love to create an actual cartoon series that would run almost the same amount of length as a cartoon you'd see on television, which is about twenty-something minutes, sans commercials.  Imagine doing a twenty minute cartoon and doing around ten episodes of that cartoon.  That's about fourteen thousand images right there.  No small feat.  I might finish by the time I'm thirty.  Plus, I'd have no time to work on other projects for myself or others.  I definitely don't want to be doing that, though.  So, it seems symbols might speed up the process.  I just need to find out how to use them!  I might just have to do frame by frame for now until I can find out how to do the other because while I'm trying to learn one thing, I'm doing nothing.

I guess we'll see what I can come up with...eventually.