Baby Bites - The Movie

Here it is. It's only 4 seconds long, so don't blink.
A Quicktime movie of my first animated scene using Photoshop and ImageReady to process the drawings.
I think it works pretty well.

Just in case I win the Oscar for this scene, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank my inspiration and muse.
To my inspiration, my tiny little son Jack. Without you the baby wouldn't be as cute or fun.
To my muse, my very lovely wife Gypsy. With your encouragement and love I feel I can accomplish anything.

And now, onto another bit of animation!!

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.

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.