Extended Practise: Kingdom of Masks Inbetweening

 Extended Practise
Kingdom of Masks Scene 7 Inbetweens and Clean-Up

• This week:
• I worked on inbetweening Scene 7 for Khoa and Amy's project.
• What went well:
• I decided to try using the Pencil tool to inbetween Khoa's frames this week. Unlike using the brush tool, you can not use textures with the pencil tool, however I found the line smoothing and snapping incredibly useful for making cleaner betweens. 
• Another thing I had also learnt through inbetweening Scene 7 was understanding timing and spacing better, whilst only animating on 3s. This also meant my understanding of character movement and easing was improved through this, because I could space frames closer to each other or further depending on how much I wanted the motion to ease. Khoa also made use of smear frames in his keys, so I also followed this with my inbetweens, if there was a particularly large motion in a small amount of time.

Adding smear frames

• I also learnt a lot about cleaning up the "Line strokes" with this Scene. As I have been assigned the role of cleaning up the line strokes for the colourist, this was the first scene I found challenging. Once I applied the lines to the colour-art layer, some of the strokes didn't join properly. I needed to manually go through and make sure each line was joined or cleaned up, which is a role found in industry. This gives me a lot of experience in more intricate and tedious tasks.

Working on Line Clean-up

• Here are the final inbetweens for Scene 7:

• What could be improved:
• I think that the run animation could be spaced a little bit better, or betweened further to make it smoother. At some points the feet feel a bit choppy and this would be further improved with added betweens.
• There are a few points throughout this Scene where his cape doesn't move quite right or jitters slightly. This could be both from the minimal betweening and I need to watch the spacing more for those frames, which is something I will keep in mind when I animate the cape in Scene 9. A reference video might be possible to help with this, or firstly inbetweening the figure, before the cape.
• Next time:
• I'll be inbetweening Scene 9.