So, I've been very MIA this month and, as you can see by the title, it's for a big reason which is I've been cracking down on animating the rough first pass. If I properly followed schedule I would be around five minutes, however I came to realize on the way that I am not a machine sadly and, in fact, a human being. It doesn't help this all began around the holidays and I also had to deal with a big family ordeal that made it hard to peroperly work.
Due to this being my first time seriously animating I guess I'll take this time to explain what I've learned:
The biggest thing I learned was how to make proper smear frames. This is a huge thing for me since I have always been facinated by this animation cheat, but never understood how to put it into practice. I spent a lot of time on Pinterest to look up reference as well as watching some Warner Brother's animation to see how they went about making those frames as well as timing them. A couple thousand frames in, I can confidently say I have a full understanding on this aspect of animation. Tweening is also something I had to relearn since I try not to use sice I don't want it to become a crutch, however I find it useful for background stills and assets as well as paralaxing camera angles. There's not much to say besides I see why a lot of early 2000s flash animation relied on this feature.
Another big one is breaking down my characters when animating and making them a proper second hand element to draw! I'm so happy with my past self for making the Milkman and Alphonse such simple yet pleasing designs to draw since it makes them fun to redraw for every frame! I can successfully now break down the Milkman's head into a rounded off square and properly draw on his features as well as redraw his full body for larger shots. Now I'll discuss goals of what I want to improve on or learn from Adobe Animate:
I really want to understand the camera feature in the program since I think it would make my life much easier in a lot of aspects. The only thing keeping me back from learning is messing up my scene somehow. I think it would be useful for zoom ins and outs. I want to learn more about using symbols for future mouth movement as well as possibly arm and leg movements (however, I'm still not sure since I don't want my animation to come off as stiff).
I bet there's other things I want to learn, but can't think of off the top of my head lol. Anyway, have some screen shots on what's going on behind the scenes so you guys can get a glimpse on what the project is going to look like. (It might be a lot of thirst bait sowwy)
