And then I found this by Sabrina Cotugno.
Pretty sweet. I like the style of lineless animation and the colour coherency overall, but I also love the way this just doesn't look like your average Flash animation. So I sat down tonight to analyse it and figure out what she did to get it the way it looks.
And this is what I came up with:
1. 99% of character animation shot on 3s. Some on 2s. Almost none on 1s. If I was to apply this to my 30 second film, even if I animated every 3rd frame (which I'm not - I'll be hand-animating a lot less than that) I'd still only have 250 frames to draw. Sounds manageable.
2. Said characters look mostly redrawn for major actions, but are probably compiled into symbol libraries on every redraw, because there's also a lot of symbol re-use, but not in horribly obvious ways. A bit of a slight movement here and there but nothing major like the kinds of things you see on the ABC in the afternoons.
3. Lineless shapes ftw. Makes the tiny shape tweens she has on things like hair-bits bouncing and stuff look much less crap and more like real shapes in animation.
4. All the backgrounds look like they're PS layers turned into bitmap symbols. I'd say she used alpha tweens on the layers to get the fade-in glow at the beginning on the trees and leaves and so on.
5. Backgrounds and effects are done on 1s, but she's avoided problems with sliding by putting foreground objects in the way of the feet when they're walking along the ground plane, so it just gives the effect of a slight shift on the camera angle as it pans with the movement.
6. Obviously she's made animation her bitch and so the lines of action are still all perfect and everything's on-model with the redraws and so on. I wouldn't be surprised if she did pencil tests for all the major character animation before redrawing over it in Flash.
Even if I use none of the above techniques in my film for this semester, it's something to think about for third year anyway. You can probably do all the same stuff in Toon Boom as well.
