Extended Practise: 11 Second Challenge - Betweening

 Extended Practise
11 Second Challenge Inbetweening

• This week:
• I worked on the in-betweens for the 11 Second Competition, which Emily had done the keyframes and breakdowns for.
• What went well:
• I was able to apply a lot of my knowledge using arcs and easing for this particular animation, which I had learnt more techniques about in The Animators Survival Kit by Richard Williams and a new book I was looking at for COP, called Drawn to Life, by Walk Stanchfield. In addition to this, it tested my ability to stay on-model with a character design that wasn't my own style.
• Here are the key-frames:

• One of the biggest problems I ran into with this, was having to use Photoshop for animating, as that was what Emily had access to. I extremely struggle to inbetween in Photoshop, as the software isn't properly built for high amounts of frames and so much data in one file. Therefore, I found a tutorial on Toon Boom Harmony's website, which allows you to import Photoshop folders as layers into the software. 

• I was then able to properly inbetween the keys, without worrying about over-loading the software and crashing. Here are the betweens I did for Shot 3:

• One thing that I was happy with was the spider movements feeling more "jumpy". I wanted to create more of a feeling that the movement was sporadic, so I exposed frames on twos with just a one exposure between, to create that jumpy-like creep forwards.
• This also creates contrast with the fly, whose movement was a lot smoother:

• As a lot of the acting had already been decided by Emily, through her keyframes and breakdowns, so I focused more on follow-through and overlapping actions, which would be seen in the flies long nose. I found that adding drag and smears made the thrashing movement more believable. 

• What could be improved:
• I think that despite the spider movement feeling sporadic, the head could have been much smoother or had more movement to it. Unfortunately with limited betweens, I couldn't create much movement, without making adjustments to the keyframes. I'll keep that in mind next time when storyboarding or giving feedback to people in the group to consider this.
• I found that the fly isn't completely centered in the frame, so this is something we will have to fix in post-production, by either cropping the video or moving the layer to centre on the background, depending on how the backgrounds have been illustrated.
• Next week:
• I will be colouring Shot 2!