Reproducing some professional animation

http://www.joep3d.com/client_images/TDWTclip1.mov

I’m learning Animate PLE and decided it would be a good learning experience to reproduce some professional animation.

Using a clip from “Total Drama World Tour”,

I drew the character and the various mouth shapes (by tracing their artwork).

Then animated and swapped the parts according to whatever they had done.

I found this very educational and plan to do a few more before creating my own content.

Please comment if you want to.

That was some nice work. Did you use articulated pieces for the arms or were they whole limbs swapped out as drawing substitutions during movement? I really like the fact that we could scrub through the scene and watch what you did on each frame.

Tony237

In answer to your question - a little bit of both. At one point the upper and lower arms are separate, but towards the end they are one element getting scaled, skewed, rotated and swapped.

These animators use scaling on one axis and rotating a lot.

I’m working on a “Family Guy” clip now that has a totally different style. They are all about tweening and it’s a lot more work.

Thanks for looking and commenting.

That is a good way to get some practice in. You could also try this with live action clips as well.

your work is really impressive, you can’t tell the difference, i bet you’ve learned alot doing this. i tried to do the same a while ago but was turned off by the amount of file conversions i had to go through, it puzzles me really why a widely used software like ToonBoom only supports .mov files… even a two step conversion like yours takes time…

Thanks for looking and commenting.

Yes I did learn a lot. I can watch TV shows now and have a much better idea of how they are achieving their animation. If I have time I’d like to do a few more. They really are a lot of fun.

And yes, I find the conversion an annoyance also. But whatever it takes I guess.

there is another excercise, one that i did once or twice, would be suitable to start after this one if you think it would help you too: i used to pause an animation and printscreen at what i figured would be a good key frame, save the image of that character then i repeated the same process capturing the next key frame until i got a long enough sequence of key frames for a certain motion i found difficult to do off the top of my head (dancing for instance). i then import the sequence as images on Animate then trace over them as you did, after tracing over key frames i would then do the inbetweeners without a reference image. i finally compared my animation to the original and adjusted the number of inetweeners until they looked exactly the same.
this helped my timing and balance alot…i strongly recommend…

That’s a good idea. I might try that next.

Hey JoesphO,

This is a really nice sample! The only niggle I have is the timing on the lipsync. I’ve learned this trick over several years in the industry, and am always excited when I find opportunities to pass it on.

While animating, scrub your sound and use the exact mouth shapes that are called for as you hear them. You’ve already done this step, and done a great job of it! Good work :slight_smile: Next, grab all of your lipsync frames, and slip them backwards either 1 or 2 frames (trial and error will come into play here).

It doesn’t make sense logically, but when you watch the clip again, you’ll find the mouth shapes match the sound perfectly. It has something to do with the fact that light travels faster than sound, and that you often see/perceive the mouth shapes a smidge before you hear the audio.

Give it a try and let us know how it turned out, and once again, great work :slight_smile:

Thanks for the feedback.

I’ll give that lipsync trick a try. Sounds like a good idea.

Great work!

You know I always think this is a great type of exercise to do. When I was learning painting, we had to do master copies, and I always learned so much from the exercise. I wish they’d make all students do this exercise - because I think they’d find it fun and informative! As long as you cite the work, of course!

~Lilly