trying out clip studio paint for a new short with some snats (snail cats) i've never animated in this before but i'm liking it so far

100 internet points if you can guess the parody

 This is going to be a post about process for “dreepy evolves”. I’m going to focus on the final shot because that one was the most difficult to do. This is going to be very long, so feel free to skip all the boring words and look at the pictures.

This shot was an attempt at Itano Circus, which I’ve never tried before. If you don’t know what that is, it’s those shots in anime that follow swarms of rockets launching. It’s named after Ichiro Itano who came up with that style of fighting sequences.

So because I never attempted anything like this before, and I knew I wanted to animate on paper, I needed to plan things out very carefully. I used storyboard pro to figure out all of the camera angles.  

 It ended up becoming one long camera pan:

 From here, I could tell that I needed 3 backgrounds and 4 layout drawings. I started with the backgrounds first since they would help inform the layout stage.  

Next I painted them with poster paints. When I’ve painted backgrounds in the past I ended up with curling paper, even though I’m using very heavy 200lbs cold pressed watercolor paper. This time, I tried out a new technique, where after it’s finished and dried, you take a damp sponge to the back of it, put it face down between some wood, and pile some heavy objects on it. This really helps to make it flat and the paper is thick enough to handle the moisture without it seeping to the side you painted on. The result was that my backgrounds scanned a lot better than when I did painted backgrounds for Mudkip or Scorbunny (those live on youtube). After that I touched everything up with some colored pencil.

 Then it was time to animate. I did a key pose or a layout pose for each angle based on those storyboards from earlier. Then I worked from there with straight ahead animation, and then a little bit of pose to pose between layouts so that the perspective shift would flow correctly. When you scan drawings with a document feeding scanner, the peg-holes of your animation will not be aligned, and it will “wiggle” all over the place. There are many software that can stabilize these for you, and TVpaint is the best one by far. However, I use OLM peg hole stabilizer because it is the fastest and It is free. Opentoonz can also do this but it messes up a bit more often and requires a lot exact preparation of file sizes. I used Opentoonz to clean, color, and time out the animation. Here’s a pencil test on 2’s with no timing:

 Once clean and color was finished, I took everything into after effects. Remember that long camera pan image from before? Here’s what it looked like when I put it all together:

 And here’s the finished product. This GIF is a little different from what ended up in the animated short. Can you tell what I changed?

That’s roughly the process I went through for every shot. This project took me more than 2 years to complete, I started on 5/18/2022, intending it to be done in flash. I changed the concept entirely, scrapped everything, and restarted on 10/21/22 after learning to use storyboard pro.  

Thanks for reading all the way to the end, happy to answer questions if there are any.

...i'll probably post it tomorrow.

working on something. here's a pencil test.

This post is for anyone curious about the inspiration behind the story of this work. I was inspired by an ukiyo-e print that is part of Katsushika hokusai's manga; a portrait of a woman with a seated tengu. I wanted to see if I could animate with something close to a woodblock print style. As far as challenges go, I don't think I'll be doing something with such thin brush strokes in flash again (I was at zoom 200 brush 2 on BG and 4 on CH for any old school flash nerds out there). I did some compositing on the linework by exporting the layers separately to try to match what an ukiyo-e print edge would look like. See original here, hopefully posting this is okay since the artist is cited and also long deceased:

It was possible to find the story of this image by doing a reverse image search online, This is a depiction of a legend from Heian period of a monk, 真済, (possibly pronounced Minshake, or known as Masao Kakimoto) who turns into a blue tengu demon from lusting after the emperor's woman. Allegedly he died from a broken heart and his blue demon ghost haunted the lady. I was not able to find any information in English about this legend,but here's a link to the source material that I was able to find on Japanese Wikipedia, and also the blog where I found the names:

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%9C%9F%E6%B8%88

https://blog.goo.ne.jp/caneteregardepas/e/d4f0d8562fb2bcfb0894d3fde682c241

It seems as if the monk in this legend was a real living person as there is a lot of information on him, the temples, and who the ruler was at the time. (check out the translation function on your browser for more, my command of Japanese language is not good)

One of the temples that the monk was associated with was called Jingo-ji 神護寺, a buddhist temple in Kyoto. However, The emperor at the time could have been possibly residing at Ninna-ji 仁和寺, so I thought perhaps the ghost might have decided to haunt that area instead since the object of his affection may have at one point resided there.

The shrine that the Kappas are taking care of in the beginning is based on the Kamo shrines 賀茂神社 in Kyoto. Even though Kappas are demons, and these shrines in reality are meant to prevent demons from entering the city, their association with the Kamo River that runs through Kyoto made it feel like an appropriate place for benevolent Kappa exorcists to reside.

The music for this was recorded on a kalimba with a pickup inside, and the drums were recorded digitally played on a Akai MPK 249. The woodblock sound is from real Taiko Bachi, which I own exclusively to play Taiko Drum master and not to do any sort of real drumming.

Overall this animation took me 1 year and 4 months to complete, mainly due to the choice of line and higher level of detail on character design than I usually do. I try to be more economic with lines and this animation is a perfect example of why.

Thanks for checking out my work and reading all the way to the end!

WIP from the cinderace animation back in august of 2021

too spicy for youtube

old WIPS from my pokemon animations made between 2020-2021