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I made a video called About You for an animation tournament. It's about a guy who can't remember what happened to him after an accident. Apparently, I made it to the next round of this thing. But before I get to work on it, I want to show my process here. You know, for record-keeping.
First, I came up with the idea and wrote the script. I knew I had to come up with something fast since I was on a time limit, so I drew inspiration from a personal thing that happened to me.
Sorry for that first page. The program I use to write these things (Adobe Story) creates that page automatically. I'm not that pretentious. I didn't really focus on fixing the story, because I was already running behind on time. I like paying a lot of attention to my stories, but I guess I couldn't really do that this time.
Next came the dialogue recording. I got some of my friends to record the lines for me (and my sister for the voice of the mom). I don't like using my voice, because I can't really listen to it objectively. I don't know if it has a happy, annoying, or any other tone to it (and I can't ask anyone
I know, because I feel like they would always lie to make me feel good. Maybe I should ask you random people on the internet.). We recorded each scene in one go. As in, we recorded the whole first scene without stopping the recording, stopped it, and then recorded the second scene without stopping the recording, and stopped it. It doesn't matter if they made mistakes either. If they made a mistake, they would just start over from the same line they were on, and I would cut out the mistakes in editing. All the sounds were recorded in Adobe Audition by the way, as well as the sound mixing/editing.
Afterwards, I made the music on Reason. Because there is going to be actual prize money for this tournament, I don't want to deal with the hassle of paying another person for their music. I didn't want heavy instrumentals on this anyway. They were two simple instruments: piano and violin.
This was the setup for the first song on the video. ASAP (as simple as possible).
Audio mixing. I still don't know how this process works. I don't know when people plan the timing for their animations. Is it when they're mixing the sounds or when they're making the storyboard? For me, it's when I'm mixing the sounds. I usually just edit the audio together to where everything sounds normal, and then I save the whole thing as an mp3 and send it over to my animation program where it's ready to animate. Here's how the mix of the first scene looked like.
Design. Basically, the design for the room and characters. The design of the room was what I pictured in my head while writing the script, so I just went with it. Everything else I had to spend some time on planning. I really liked the outfit designs for Daniel and Blake. I don't usually draw designs on shirts, because they just make it more tedious to animate. For this video though, I felt it was needed.
The storyboard. This is where I laid everything out with very crappy drawings. I numbered the script and the drawings on the storyboard accordingly, so I could tell where the shots would change and such. Look at the following images and you'll understand.
Yes, the shots and movement in the video are very lazy, and that was the plan all along. I guess it was an experiment for me, to see if I could create an interesting story with just static drawings and moving mouths.
Animation. There's nothing much to talk about here except one thing. That is, how I drew everything out so it'd be easy to fill in the colors later on. So here it is, ASAP: Since the bucket tool in Flash fills in areas that are completely closed off, I had to make sure some areas were open where I wanted the same color to spread into. Just so I wouldn't have to click more times with the bucket tool than I needed to.
For example, I made sure to make the ear look like this:
Instead of this:
So I wouldn't have to click twice with the fill-in bucket, in that little hole and then outside of the hole. It's a real time saver when you have to do this for a hundred other frames or so.
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That's it. I don't know why I did this. There's just a lot I wanted to talk about, but nobody to talk about it to. I don't know many people that would be interested in hearing of the design of an ear.
Thanks for reading all of this! It means a lot. I guess I just revealed more about myself to you guys, posting my Newgrounds account and whatnot, but whatever. You probably don't care, but you can find all of the other videos I've made in Flash there. I wonder... Maybe for the next animation in this tournament I'll use Photoshop. We'll see.
Sayonara.
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