this will help the piece feel more animated than it is. Notice that the animations aren’t all the same. you have the slowly fading lights at the top and the flashing of the DS, this makes it dynamic to look at.
vary the lengths of each animated piece.
this part is tricky because you need to do a little math & adjusting, but make it so different things go at different rates. the gif’s loop will seem less obvious and more natural.
speaking of which, make a successful loop. carry over actions from the end of the animation to the beginning so that everything doesn’t all stop at one point.
avoid a lot of soft shading. I use textured brushes to get around this, but you’ll get a lot of bad diffusion and noise if you try animating a soft painting.
if your animating frame by frame, draw your start and end positions first and keep them on a low opacity (or onion skin. if you got that). this way you can stay on track and make a good loop.
look up what site you’re posting on. know the boundaries and adjust.
for example, tumblr:
2MB limit
540px max on width
long, vertical pieces have bad quality. I stick to a 3:4 ratio at most
tumblr doesn’t like cyans. idk why.
this will affect how you export and how you plan to make it in the first place.
export, test, export, test, it’ll be hard but don’t settle for your animation looking bad. yeah you’ll have to learn a lot by making a lot, but focus on trying to get 1 thing successful with a piece
slow down your frame rate. I get it’s aesthetic to have a 4 frame loop going at 30 fps, but longer loops will be less urgent or anxious looking. plus people will be more inclined to look longer. slower frame rates (as long as it isn’t like. 4fps.) are worth a try. it depends on your intention
observe your environment! find motions that could be looped you could study
learn layer masks and clipping masks. thank me later
don’t try to animate everything. animate what makes sense or what you plan for.
and that’s about all I can think of right now!! I hope this helped you a bit, good luck!!
Note: Finding a tutorial is waaay harder than we thought it was going to be. These were some of the better ones that we could find. The links have more information about the specific processes. we hope that these will suffice for you guys until specific, in detail, tutorials are found.
“There’s nice insights throughout, but one of the most useful pieces of information comes toward the end of the video when video creator Marc Hendry talks about what compelled him to make this animation analysis video in the first place.
Hendry explains that a while back he posed this question to Disney animators through a Facebook page: What questions should an animator ask when studying another animator’s work? Contemporary master Eric Goldberg wrote him back with this list of things he asks himself when studying animation:
How are the different attitudes expressed using the entire body?
What kind of shape design is used to graphically support the idea of the pose?
How are secondary items like hair and cloth, used to support the overall design and movement?
What kind of shape manipulation is going on, particularly in the face, to better feel the expressions and lip-synch?
What’s a key, what’s a breakdown, and what’s an inbetween?
How are internal and external features defined in the animation? (What’s hard bone, what’s fat, what’s muscle, what’s loose hanging flesh, what’s squishy, what isn’t?)
How is the use of one or two frames of distortion effective in defining the action?
Goldberg is basically explaining the difference between the passive act of watching cartoons and the active task of seeing cartoons. Seeing transforms the viewer into a student; as a student, one analyzes the choices that were made by the artist and tries to understand why a piece of animation looks and feels the way it does.”
From image 1 to 5 we have 5 different scales of different impacts, notice how the shapes of the smoke are all different from small to huge, this is very important in order to communicate the force of the impact.
We have a very small transparent round shaped smoke for image 2 vs a very dense with shadows and lots of little details for image 5. If you want to animate a very big explosion you have to keep in mind that the bigger it gets the more details you have to draw (debris, fire, lights and shadows, etc.), also, massive smokes are more dense and move slower. We are always trying to avoid these huge epic smokes because they are very time consuming, so it’s better to think about ways of showing big scale without actually having to draw it all. For example on image 5 the camera is following julith for a couple of seconds so all the big smokes on the bottom doesn’t need to be animated because they are out of the frame.
can you advice how to handle epic scenes? (Like tsunami flooding the city, or village in fire).
If you want to communicate effectively that something is huge you need to: draw tons of details, they have to move slow, you need something small so the audience can compare and tell how big is the thing you are showing. And I recommend that the scenes don’t last too long, unless you want to spend all your life in front of the computer drawing tiny slow lines… We actually avoid this scenes at Ankama because we are a small team, so I can’t really tell you anything more useful.
Inspiration Haven 