Process

Trying not to overthink is hard. “Well, it’s not ‘really’ cloud computing unless the cloud itself was computing...” I’ve overthought before, like in my Easter animation, and almost nobody complained about that one.

I think the process of animation is something that people like to consider definite, something that works for every project. But the reality is that no two animations are the same and therefore the process needs to be different each time. They need to depend on:

1. The tools you have
2. The time you have
3. What happens in the animation

I think it’s more accurate to think of the art of animation as a set of building blocks that can be combined in different permutations to define the process of creating a particular animation. What these building blocks are, and how to combine them together, can be taught and immediately understood to an extent (e.g. the traditional rough -> cleanup -> color process), but beyond the basic ideas a lot of it comes down to experimenting with the tools, trying things out and hypothesizing what you could do better if you were to do it all over again next time. Because while no two animations are the same, they will always share some individual components. Your process should always be in line with what the animation requires. If the animation changes, the process changes.

So what’s the point of all this? I very quickly realized that all this animation really called for is some arm movement (subtle enough to entirely reuse whole keyframes), and an eye blink or two. So while one may have done all the animation as a rough stage and then redoing it all over again in the cleanup, I literally only drew one frame for the rough, and all the animation was done directly in the cleanup. This saved me huge amounts of needless work.

Also, I was finally able to put together a setup to record the cleanup process.