Animatic Tutorial

This development entry will show the process of creating a scene, and its evolution from sketch into full blown animation. The scene I’m detailing is when Sparky turns quickly to face Meat, and then rushes towards him.

The first step has been shown before, creating the storyboard:

Next, using Toon Boom, I loosely sketch out the keyframes that I want to be sure to hit. Doing this within the timeline creates a useful rough animatic. Here’s what that animatic looks like:

I then create circles to represent the head and body of Sparky. I animate these circles directly over the keyframe animatic from the previous step, and what I end up with is a well-timed animatic blueprint with basic motioned displayed. This is the main animatic that I will reference throughout the project. Here’s that animatic overlayed with the keyframe animatic:

And here it is by itself:

Now we’re getting to the meat of the project. I typically attack the core of the animation at this point, putting a majority of my effort in the torso as that will yield the most convincing bang-for-the-buck. Getting the squash and stretch right here is one of my primary goals. The secondary movement of the ears, tail and leg fat are also quite important to sell the action. Tip: Since creating this scene I’ve started putting the ears and tail on separate layers for greater control. Don’t be afraid to spend the extra couple of minutes to properly put drawing elements on their own layer if they deserve it. You’ll save more time than you realize.

Here’s the torso overlayed with the movement animatic:

And here it is by itself:

Next I add the arms and legs. Note that I don’t create the full leg, just enough to cover the screen. These projects are long enough, don’t waste time on elements that will never be seen. With the arms and legs:

Now I add the face. Grr!

Color is always important. I’ve started using shadows to give the characters greater depth. In Toon Boom use the “Stroke” tool along with the “View/Show Strokes” selection to create the shadows. The stroke tool basically allows you to draw invisible lines.

The last step is to add background color and speed lines. Speed lines are a useful tool to impart a sense of action and extreme movement. They’re relatively easy to do since abstraction is the goal. I’m interested in building a library of speed lines and effects for Toon Boom and Flash animators to use. While I ponder that, here’s the final version (23 frames, 44k):

Tags: animatic, toon boom tutorials