Animation is not a simple process. I know and understand that, but my ignorance assumed it only seemed hard because I didn't know what I was doing or how to do it. So when assigned the job of creating a one hundred page flip book, I was overwhelmed with the amount of pages, but thought, "It's just a flip book, right?" I settled down to create this "flip book" expecting to spend two, two and a half hours. Tops. Simplistically, I could have just settled for a dancing stickman with a random bouncing ball appearing in the background, but being the overachiever, I wanted something more exciting. Since the flip book had to include a ball, my initial thought was to have a dog playing with the ball. Great. I had the general concept and even though I wasn't sure exactly where I was going, I had a start. The first twenty cards the excitement was still buzzing. Dog was cute. Idea was creative. Things were going AWESOME until the cards continued on and on and on. Never thought it could be so difficult to visualize a dog running. I was really regretting my over-achievement and just wanted to ditch the whole idea and just have balls bouncing around the cards. I struggled on. Four hours later and five hours tops, the flip book was complete.
Overall, the process of the flip book taught me several things. One, I never want to draw a dog again. Ever. Two, technology has made me extremely slack. Several times I wished I had a real-life copy and paste function so I didn't have to redraw the same sections over and over. Three, my respect for 2D animators which was already significantly high somehow managed to grow even higher. And four, there has got to be an easier way that I somehow missed. I hope.
Then began the struggle to make my "analog" flip book become an awesome looped digital animation. Having already experience the analog meltdown halfway through the flip book, my expectations of enjoyment for the digital translation was extremely low. Generally time consuming and irritating, most of the hard stuff had already been worked out in the flip book, so the digital transformation just required the tiring process of scanning each card, trimming to the same size, and cleaning up the scans. After that, all I had to do was use awesome After Effects and bring the images in as a sequence and VIOLA! Eh, well that's the general idea. The actual process is not so smooth, but once in a groove, the process can be done without much thought. I'm feeling much more positive about the digital work than the analog, but you couldn't have one without the other. Technically it all could have been done digitally, but the best way to learn is to begin with the basics and grow into the newer media outlets.
Now to just figure out what I'm going to do with my first animation video....
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