Experimentation (Photoshop characters)

Okay, so concentrating on my Beardyman animation for now, and getting to a point where I should get to animating it. Should be asking round for voices at this point, I'll probably ask Devin Mack, who voiced the pirate in one of my previous animations, Arrgh Idol, to do the voice of my beardy man. I'm also considering asking one of my internet friend's fiancee to do the voice of the wife (who I still need to do a proper design for).

So trying to decide on an animation style for this, I am once again reminded of my general train of thought concerning the past two years at uni.

"ALL MY ANIMATIONS ARE NOTHING BUT F***ING FLASH!!!"

It's a bit late in the day to think of learning new programs for the sake of completing a one minute short withing two weeks. So, I'm trying to think of a method of making this look like I actually tried. I have thought about sticking flash animation in After Effects for some of the scenes, but then it'd still be obviously flash animation.

It is then I am reminded of a FLIP festival lecture from a couple of years back, held by Boulder Media, the animation studio who was working on various animated series such as Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends and El Tigre. I remember them showing off some FLA files of the various shorts they worked on, and constantly reiterating the same thing:

"When we make stuff digitally, we want it to look as less digital as possible"

Or something along those lines. Basically, this boils down to taking standard vector stuff and adding a lil photoshop magic to give it a less digital look. In one of the FLAs they showed of their short film, Carte de Visite, they showed how they had animated the thing in Flash, but made it so it was composed of several little photoshopped bits to make it more realistic, such as the shading style you simply can't make in vector without chucking in a crapton of blur filters.

Going on this train of though, I decided to have a little crack at making a model of my Beardyman in Photoshop that I can export into Flash.



This is my progress so far. I have made each part on a seperate layer, so that they can be individually animated in Flash. With good ol' tweens of course. They were drawn at a resolution of almost 4x times the resolution of my animation (standard PAL Widescreen, since I realise now that animating something in flash on a 1080p canvas is stupid)so that I can get some good close up shots without causing any unsightly pixellation. The plan is to draw several different layers to make up the different hand shapes, eye expressions, etc.

With the model I have made so far, I have done a test animation in Flash. There is also the option of animating it in After Effects, but Flash seems to be the more comfortable option.

http://spamtheweb.com/ul/upload/100510/47_pscharactertest.php

One of the more notable changes of the general design I have made is the replacement of the mouth with a giant moustache. This way, I can simply squash and stretch the moustache to make mouth movements instead of wasting too much time on lipsync.

I'll be working more on this model, designs for other characters and heck, maybe I'll actually get off my arse and animate it. Still waiting to hear from the Level 5 lackeys.