Sunday, July 27, 2008

Exposure Sheet

I've timed out the scene with a stopwatch. It'll take nearly five seconds to show the actions I want.

Then I filled out the left column of my Exposure-sheet (or X-sheet) describing accurately, to the frame, when I want things to happen.

The drawing numbers were then exposed in their columns.

X-sheets are frame by frame instructions for shooting or compositing the animation. Each row corresponds to one frame. In this case it takes 25 frames to add up to one second. The columns signify the different levels for the animation. The baby is "B" level, the spoon "S", and the chair I've called "BG".

After the X-sheet was filled out I went ahead and animated the scene. You can see that I reused some drawings at the head and tail of the scene. I also made tracings of the first drawing and cycled them to keep the animation alive. I like the hand drawn look and aspect of traditional animation and I don't really want to spend my time making my drawings "perfect".

Now that the animation is finished the drawings get scanned and imported into photoshop. More on that soon.