Wednesday's Lesson and Correspondence

Finally had our first Industry Exercise lesson with Steve!
I pitched my idea to him, and he's allowed me to work in 2D for this project, since it's what I want to improve at :D Of course, I am still going to follow his 3D tutorials and complete them outside of lessons. I will post the results up here if possible...

So, after showing my storyboard to a few of my friends I think I am going to pursue my 'Singing in the Rain' idea. I was confused how to go about this though, since we won't be covering it in class, and so I emailed one of our heads of the course; Mike Smith! Below is the correspondence;


Hi Mike!

For my second industrial exercise project I want to animate on top of my
chosen film with a 2D character, and since you have experience of doing
this in the past, I was wondering the best way to go about it.

Can I animate my 2d character on toon boom/flash then import it on after
effects or do i need to animate the entire thing on after effects?

-Michelle



His reply;



Hi Michelle,

You can do one of the following production processes.

Traditionally draw your character animation on paper, clean it up then
scan to and if you require a specific look, import it into Illustrator
(or Photoshop) to tidy the line and colour. Import the coloured artwork
into After Effects, convert to 3D-2D and place accordingly into your
3D-2D BG - environment.

Using a wacom tablet complete your rough and some or all of your clean
up animation in either Toon Boom Studio, Toon Boom Animate or Flash.
Colour your character artwork in these software packages then import the
artwork to After effects.

Complete both of the above processes then separate out the artwork
(upper arm, lower arm, hand, fingers etc) and either complete pivoting
or hinging process either in the above softwares or in After Effects.
I'm pretty sure you can export to After Effects after you have completed
hinging but check the help files.

It really depends on what software you feel most comfortable completing
animating and what overall look or style your going for.

I hope that helps!

Regards,

Mike.


So my next step is to perhaps draw a more detailed storyboard, and generally just get animating!! Need to also finalise my old man design.
Here goes!