Animation
An unfinished scene from my up coming animation...
I
started work on this animation nearly a year ago. I thought that it would be
quick, an animation piece similar to that of High Tail Hall. (A wonderful flash
game found here:
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/182224 ) I made a few sketches of
about 8-10 scenes that I would animate using simple tweens, and it originally
consisted of these scenes from make out, through the basic foreplay, into the
climax and possibly anal sex, all with tweens to animate it. I began work on the
animation using only a mouse, Macromedia Flash, and only a basic understanding
of how to animate. Naturally, the results were less than stellar.
So, I had to re-think this animation. I took a bit of a break
to hone my skills on sketching and illustration, and shortly thereafter I
purchased a Wacom tablet to help speed the digital art process. This time I
re-adjusted and began work on another scene, but again, nothing very good came
from it. Again, I took a step a back and tried another scene. This time I used
more tweening, and because of my tablet, I could now draw more frames easily in
the same amount of time to increase the detail, without increasing the work. I
plugged in about 10 hours into a simple test scene, but still nothing terribly
arousing came of it.
Discouraged, I took a couple months off of the project to
hone my skills in figure drawing, ink drawing, coloring with Flash and shading
with Photoshop, and completely ignoring the animation for several weeks almost
giving up. It was during this time I improved in my drawing, so I took another
stab at it and promised myself I would finish at least one scene. I worked on
and 'finished' the scene you see above, dubbed "the apartment scene". This scene
was being worked on at the same time as another scene, the difference being that
the one above is frame-by-frame, and the other scene (not shown) was made of
mostly tweens. I looked at the quality of the other scene and this one, and it
became clear that frame-by-frame was the way to go.
Now, here is the problem. The scene above is of a relatively low frame rate: the wolf is about 3 frames-per-second, and the fox is at about 4 frames-per-second. As you may have noticed, they are animate but very choppy. There are roughly 70 separate sketched, inked, colored, and then shaded figures placed upon a fairly detailed background in the scene above, just to give you an idea of what it takes to create an animation.
Now
at 20 seconds of animation, that is a lot a lot of work. However, I'm still
going to try to increase the frame rate to 6FPS, and maybe even 12FPS for some
of the more intense scenes. This should give a very smooth and hopefully very
sexy animation.
SI'll be hitting the project again, this time with full
force. I'm now confident in my abilities as an artist, and my knowledge of
animating is much better than a few months ago. Again, this is a lot of work and
just may be the biggest undertaking I have ever attempted. Just hold tight, and
you will see some scenes progress over the next few weeks.