This is only a test...

Before I get too deep into my little production I want to animate a short test.

Baby sits in chair. Spoon with food enters. Baby bites spoon & food. Baby chews and swallows spoon.

That's it. Just a simple gag. Quick and easy to animate and evaluate.

Since I'm using Adobe Photoshop and ImageReady to process my animation and they export animation at a frame rate of 25 frames per second (instead of the normal film speed of 24 fps) I want to see if this will make a difference. Also, I want to get a handle on the character design.

First I drew the key poses.













B1 - Baby in chair.













B8 - Baby leans forward with mouth wide open.













B11 - Baby bites spoon.













B23 - Back to start pose with baby eating the spoon.

After checking out these poses I decided to give the action a little more snap and made a more extreme open-mouth drawing.













B10 - That's pretty funny.
It goes between drawings B8, the open mouth and B11, the bite.

Now all I gotta do is inbetween it. No sweat.

A Little Layout

I've made a layout drawing of the baby sitting in his highchair. The goal here is to design a composition that allows the action/animation to read clearly and is staged so that the gags and acting are the focus. I've allowed space for a spoon to enter from the left, this also gives the baby room to lean forward and bite food from the spoon.

Because I am doing this project alone I needn't clean-up my layout. I am also working quite small. This layout is drawn at a 4 field, roughly 3"x4". (more about fields in a later post)

The choice of working smaller was made for a few reasons. First, it's a good size for me to draw and not fuss too much over details. Secondly, when animated, I want the hand-drawn line to be part of the life of the animation. Another reason for the small drawing is a technical one, it takes less time to scan a small drawing.

I began by roughing out the drawing in blue, as you can see, and after looking at it for a moment I noticed that I had made the field too tight, not enough space around the baby. As a matter of fact I had cut his cute little feet off. The back of the chair was also uncomfortably close the right edge of the frame. When I tightened up the drawing in black, I widened out a bit and it felt much better.

I'm pretty happy with this layout. It meets the needs I have for composition and clarity. Now I can begin animating. Since I'll be doing some tests and experiments I'll keep the scene short, about 5 seconds. This will be long enough to give me enough information to make some choices that will, hopefully, give me the look I'm after. And it will be short enough to get it done quickly.

Thumbnails

To work out how I want the gags for my cartoon to work, I've made little storyboard/gag drawings or thumbnail sketches. These are small, rough and quick sketches. Essentially these are ideas on paper. In a studio production these would ordinarily get cleaned up and submitted as a storyboard, but since I'm doing this myself, I'm not going to need clean boards.

Thumbnails are quick and easy to draw and, if it turns out that they don't serve the main idea, they are easily discarded.

Animators also use thumbnails to plan out the poses for their animation.

In the thumbnails for my cartoon the baby is lowered into his highchair, a spoonful of food is offered from the left, he twists away from it. More food is offered from the right, which he also declines. Both spoons enter, he grabs them, propelling the food back at the offscreen servers. A bowl of gloppy food is deposited on the tray. He raises his fists high and slams them down on to the tray sending the bowl and it's contents flying up out of frame. The bowl lands quickly, then is filled with the gloppy food. The baby laughs and does it again. He laughs again and tries it a third time and accidentally hits the bowl, splatting the food onto his face. A spoon enters and scrapes the food from his face and feeds it to the now cooperative baby.

This is just one page of thumbnails I've made for this little film. Time will tell how many pages of sketches I will need before the short is finished.