You can do it if you really want.

Tonight I don't have any pictures to post because I'm animating on my laptop and the whole process gets messy. Instead, I figured I would share some links that may be generally useful for me and everyone else. It's still research/thesis related, there just isn't anything to look at.


So you wanna learn Photoshop? You should try this ridiculous list of tutorials here.

And say you need some anatomy help. Well, this is an equally ridiculous list of Deviantart tutorials on anatomy and drawing people.

Perhaps animals are giving you some issues? Behold, the answers may be in this list somewhere.

Each link is to a Deviantart page that links to almost every tutorial on DA for that particular subject. I haven't been through the animal one, but I've probably been through most of the Photoshop tutorials just by searching around on DA without this list. (And now I find it, great.) I've looked through a lot of the anatomy links before. My favorites are anything by Cedarseed like the one for faces, different ethnicities and regional variations in human anatomy, general genetic variation in humans, and the general guide to musculature. The drawings are very simple and everything's explained pretty well. (Weirdly enough, I'm almost dead on with the Baltic body type given my Eastern-European genes, and I draw most of the time in a style that resembles those face shapes too.) The detail of information is incredible and really fascinating.

I know not everyone learns very well through reading and books and such, but learning this way is literally how I learned to draw. I've been reading books on drawing since I was in elementary school, and even if I may lose a bit by not reading everything that goes with the pictures, I always come out of a book with a few more skills than I started with.

So, there's my research. I've been looking at tutorials on DA to learn to draw stuff and color it. In actual animation news, I'm almost finished with this scene where Ella sits down and looks disgruntled and it really makes me happy. I can see so much improvement in the flow and proportions of my animation even from last semester and it makes me happy. I'm glad I'm keeping my lines loose for cleanup because it really preserves my drawing style better.

This is probably what it sounds like when doves cry.

I had this great combination of determination, exhaustion, and anxiety last night that somehow convinced me that most of my issues with this film could be solved by cutting out two scenes and adding like...14 or something. I realized that a lot of my animation issues were stemming from trying to do too many actions in one shot instead of cutting, and it only made me reluctant to even bother animating. INSTEAD, I've done up a few things to increase clarity as well as increase the amount of cuts I'm doing per scene.
This is the first part of where Mel gives her the apple to appease her and it doesn't work. She takes it from him, sits down as the camera zooms in a bit, then she looks unamused. He gets on his thinking face and sees the stump behind her. Then it cuts to the part in the middle of the page (hey, I understand it, you don't have to) where he points behind her and she sees the tree shoot up. Then she gets all shocked face, and it cuts to an apple wigglin' in a tree.

Contine to the apple falling (motion blur!) as the screen pans down with her looking at it. Then it lands next to her. She looks up at the tree (I need to switch screen direction on all three of those), a whole bunch of apples fall (After Effects!), and then they sit next to each other and he looks pleased. Then she pushes him.

I think as long as I establish that the tree grows to the point that it sort of looms over them, it should be okay. Right now, it sort of seems too far away.
The other stuff is the redo for the last set of the scenes where she visits him during the seasons. I'm not going to explain that part. I have to animate it next week, anyway.

AND, I know this is a lot of work, but it needs to be done. My film's not coming together like it should and I should've done this a long time ago. I'm technically ahead on my animation anyway. Three of these shots are animated (one I need to fix up a lot, though), and one of them is an adjustment to an earlier scene. I have to do the tree growing scene today and a few of the reaction shots I think.


Look at my progress! I need to darken the lines still, but I might have to batch my PSD files in Photoshop first and bring them into ToonBoom again over my colored layer. ToonBoom doesn't want to darken them any further because they're so light to begin with. The timing's a little off, but I'll probably have to cut off a bit at the beginning anyway when I cut it together. The background doesn't really have buildings yet. I still have to do those :).

Have a background.

Here at my internship, the connection's too slow to update with video, but I'll try and put up my test from Toonboom soon. It turned out well considering I did a scene that only had an eye blink. I would upload the background I did for that scene too, but I left it at home.

This is the background for the very last scene of the film. It's actually a very modified version of the background for a scene not too far before it, but I don't think they're similar enough for anyone to notice. This took me maybe an hour to do, but I could do it faster if I had to, I think. At this point, I've almost got the forest from every angle, so I'm just copying and pasting bits of trees into other scenes. I really like the look so far :).

My next post will have the colored scene in it, I promise!