Overall, I’m very happy with the work that I did this semester. I think that I was able to refine my visual style a tremendous amount and explore a lot of areas and aspects of 2D animation that I had been wanting to learn about. Although I only managed to do about a third of the overall animation, the rest should not take me nearly as long to complete. I still have to animate the 3D section, the claymation section, and the hand-drawn on paper section. The 3D section should hopefully take less than a week, as I have already modeled both of the characters and am animating the entire thing using existing mocap data (see thesis journal week 2). The claymation will probably take about a week to shoot and a week to composite, and the hand-drawn should hopefully only take a week or two. For the hand drawn, I am thinking that because of the style (pencil on paper), it will benefit to not use color and to just keep it in black and white, so I’m thinking that will save a tremendous amount of time.
I worked incredibly hard on stylizing my characters and finally got a result that I am very happy with and one that I plan to use in a lot of future work. By coloring the lines and adding a glow in After Effects, I am able to keep the entire system modular and change the color / glow of any outline on a whim, which was incredibly practical while I was still figuring out what I wanted to do. This let me use older linework with my newer stuff and keep a consistent feel throughout.
Right now the animation is just under a minute, and I’m planning to have it be around 3. I want to keep it short, sweet, and to the point. I figure that the simplest I can boil it down (i.e. not spending a lot of time animating conversations or scenes without movement) will be best for both the story and process. Going forward, I need to find a new voice actor for the main character (Honeybear), and I’m thinking of finding a kid to voice him because I think it could be very funny to have a child voice a more “grown up” character.
