Well, I decided that I would break with my normally all-furry streak here and put up something a bit more human - my final project for Animation 101 from Spring 2009, Botched Assassination. The idea here was to storyboard, plan, animate, ink and paint an entire short animation (there was no minimum frame amount set for the project) for our final project. I chose something that, in retrospect, was rather ambitious for a guy who until recently had only done 3d animation for the most part. The result that was presented is what you see here.

The process was fairly simple, but rather time consuming. First we created a storyboard, giving us a rough guide on how we wanted the story to play out, no real animation or anything, but maybe some visual guides on what we wanted.

Next, we were asked to make an exposure sheet, or x-sheet, detailing down to the frame the actions we wished to animate, scene for scene, second for second. (This process was quite tedious and, as often happens when you try and figure these things out, prone to being wrong...)

The actual animation came next, using our x-sheets as guides for the animation, along with drawn sheets detailing the animation sequence frame by frame. (Rough guides actually - I found that in places I hadn't budgeted enough frames for actions, while in others I found I'd budgeted TOO much for the time remaining for work, so I cut it down.) I actually tended to animate straight ahead, doing everything at once per frame, which often produced some rather interesting but shaky results...

The next step was taking all of those frames of animation and scanning them into the computer for the ink and paint process. Each page took a fair amount of time to scan in, however, so this could take up an entire day or more, at least in my case, with over 200 frames of drawn animation to scan.

Next came a rough assembly in Photoshop CS4, where I took all of the animation I had made and created a pencil test from it, looking over it and seeing if there were places where I needed to add or remove frames of animation, and how the overall scene worked out. (Photoshop CS3 and above have animation timeline tools built in, making it a lot easier to make animations with it...)

Finally, there came the laborious task of ink and paint, where I took all of the frames that I had animated, inked the lines and then colored them in, much like I would do for a single image in Photoshop. The difference here was that I had to do so many of them, using simple flat colors so that I didn't overburden myself. I did manage to finish quite a lot of the work, but in the end I just ran out of time and turned in something that was unfinished - but still very entertaining, as I hope you'll see today.

So sit back and enjoy my little project! If you have trouble viewing it, view it in full view so you can see everything!

Animation and Artwork © GlenSkunk 2009