How do I draw my animation.

Basically I draw my animations in the most old fashion and traditional way. Pencil and Paper. I always prefer this way, because I think to draw my own animation with my own hand is a very good way to express my own style and skill, and I think to compare with 3d animation generated by software, 2d animations drawn by hand are much more of a piece of art.

Here are some example animation my mine.




First of all I will use flip book and it's option "capture", quickly capture the animation with the web cam, and then check if the timing of the animation was right. Then If the timing is ok then I will scan the animations with my scanner, that can give the animation a much better quality.


Then when I have done with all the scanning, I use Adobe after effect to create the animation.


Here is a example of a rendered animation(Without color)

Finally update again. A journey of work on my own...

I am sorry I haven't been updating my working blog for a while. From now on my blog will be updating again.
Our year have already finish, everyone's animation are done and have been shown in the Harbour light, except mine...
My works which saved in the University room JMo50 was wiped out... Because the staff have reinstalled the computers on the date they are not supposed to... As the result, I have been given an extension to redo my work. I will be working until 30th of June.
Such a complicated feeling... Everyone are done with their works and I have got to carry on working on my own for another month and a half. Good luck to me.

04/01/2010 Backgrounds Update

I have been drawing and paining backgrounds for my final animation through out the whole X'mas holiday, honestly, I have been working really hard, but I don't think I can finish all the background.. Anyways these are the backgrounds I have done so far, and there are one more background done in A3, becuase I don't have a A3 scanner, I could not save it into my computer yet, will get it done in the University.






I have been thinking what the backgrounds should looks like when a character hit another character really hard. Because I wanna express more intensive impact, i don't wanna just make the background as normal as it is.
I was inspired by another Japanese anime in the way how the background works when a character being hit really hard.(Thanks to my classmate Barnarbe he suggested this anime to me)
Here is the clip

The way they do it is to put a lot of black tension line on the background. Instead of using black line, I wanna try it my own way by using quick water color brush.
I painted a backgroud first and just grabbed a piece of my concept art, cut and paste onto the background. Here are my experimental piece, I think it could work.

7/12/2009 (Week 11) Character sheet and Second Animatic

I have got my Character sheet done, but in the actually animation, I doubt characters are gonna look like the same as the one you see from the character sheet. Will have the character sheet colored soon.








Also have some concept art done.





I've also managed to finish my second animatic, I have changed the dialog into a perfect English form, make sure there are no spelling mistake, wrong grammar or and funny English.
And also I have rearrange some scenes, this time the animatic won't go any longer than 3 mins.

But I don't think people are too appreciate about it this time... Should I take Adam advise and just keep those bad English dialogs as they were??

30/11/2009 Week 10, Experientmenting for my Background colour

Before I start drawing my background, I wanna make sure what I really wanna to do and how am I gonna do it. SO I did some experiments for it.

Most of the scene in my animation is gonna happen in a early peaceful morning, so I first researched some photos of early morning from the internet.




I have talked to my mate Kenny, he said he have seen the skies in the early morning, about 4or 5am, shortly before the sun rise, the sky would looks like sort of dark blue, purple and red, I quite like that kind of colour.

First of all I did a few water colour paintings and also draw a tiny version of my characters




And then I use photoshop to change the contrast and brightness of those my 'Skies Painting' and also use the Filter options to change the style of my painting, and then put my characters into these painting. I did about 60 experiments of that, so I am going to show a few of them here.







I looked through all these images and tried to find out which is probably the best colour and best style of an early morning sky for my animation, and also which one would fit my characters the best.
It took me quite a while to do these works, I am not sure which one is the best. Finally I've decide to use the Sky which is more Dark Blue, Purple and red.( maybe not that much colourful, I could turn the contrast down a little bit)


And I also like this style, maybe I can add a little bit more of light orange into my skies.


Still not too sure, if anyone would like to give me more advises please let me know, I can show you all of my experiment images, there are about 60 of them.

Also should I really get a graphic design tablet?? Not sure if I can handle it and they will cost me almost 50 pounds!!??