Monday, September 21, 2009

Subway Animation, next step

Here is the next step I took in finishing up the SUBWAY piece.

My feeling was that if I wanted to show a woman taking a seat in a subway car, that I should contrast it with another character sitting down beside her. A wobbly drunk was a good contrast, and showed proof that the woman came prepared and could defend herself.

This is just a very rough pass that I edited in with the woman's animation. The drawings were done in Photohop and timed in DigiCel Flipbook.


15 comments:

Jeremy said...

I love Will Eisner's New York and always thought that Night Rider would make for great animation. You really nailed this one out of the park! Great job and very entertaining.

Trent Correy said...

Nice acting BJ, I really love her little head shake to clear the hair from her face, gives her great character. I love seeing your rough steps to blocking in a scene, I really have no idea how you do it so well. Love seeing your work.
when can we expect to see the final version of the panda animation, I can't wait for that!

Brien Barrios said...

That's some very cool animation! I like the way he puts his bottle in his coat pocket.. and the animation of the girl is perfect.. I have a quick question.. when you did those drawings in photoshop of the hobo, are you able to flip back and forth through the drawings? or did you just do one drawing then turn the opacity down and then draw the next key from that. because i've been trying to figure out a good way to do animation keys in photoshop to transfer into flash because i like the drawing tools in photoshop so much better. but i havent found a way to flip back and forth while drawing. thanks!

mattanimation said...

I like the drunk guy on the subway, maybe because I have seen it quite a bit, but it really is a good contrast

Matt Shepherd said...

Yea this is great, I was watching some old disney stuff( Andreas Deja)the other day and how he mentioned contrasting characters with different attitudes and so on, i.e. Baloo and Mowgli the sequence where they are boxing.

Mentioning how it makes for more believable acting and so forth. It looks great is what I am seeing and you can really see the difference.

NICE!

here, which so happens to have some of Bj's work!

penciltestdepot.blogspot.com

BJ Crawford said...

thanks everyone.

jeremy, the night rider is a favorite of mine. i love the entire new york book.

trent, the panda is almost done. i hope to make time for it next week. so it'll be done VERY soon.....i hope.

brien, i can't find a good way to "flip" in photoshop either. But I put up with it, because i prefer the drawing tools as well.

Virgil said...

congrats on the august entry, very disneyesque animation, could have been done just as well by the old masters :) one thing I could say about the cartoony acting, like the cartoon take when he finds the paper, that kind of stuff is pretty generic. reactions are very diverse in the real world and I think animation looks much better when it doesn't use these recipes so literal. (I think they work more or less ok in 2d though, the old disney animation has plenty of this..) technically speaking, the movement is great - great poses, great drawings, great contrast! :) lip-sync really clear and excellent mouth shapes, could be maybe little more detailed, yet again, if it was 3d, it would have had to be less minimal :D

aaaand I love the subway animation, can't wait to see more! :D

Kevin Mcleod said...

That was good! I like the drunks line of action, his poses and how the woman is not taken back at all but simply sprays the drunk. Cant wait to see this finished.

Daniel Huertas said...

great animation and choices here man... i would just make sure the spray reads a bit more, cuz it took me a couple of 're-plays' to understand what happened there.. at first i thought it was her smell or something that push him away... i would anticipate that specific action in the pattern of the shot...

looking forward for the next wip! :)

seedoi said...

Great job! Hey BJ I think there is an option in Photoshop where you go to you window menu and select animation, it will load the images in a series where you can toggle it back and forth. I haven't actually used it but I notice I have that menu option since CS 2.

Amanda said...

Wow!! All your animation is beautiful! And your sense of design works so well with it all 8)

Mike B said...

Great work BJ. It's inspirational stuff. I've been doing a lot of CG animation but want to get back into doing more hand drawn work, since I've always loved drawing a ton. I've been looking for a good tool set to get back into it and I just used up all my animation bond on a documentary I helped out on. It's great seeing the quality of work you can get out of Photoshop and Flipbook. I can't wait to see the finished panda, and the clean ups for the subway.

Mike B said...

In regards to flipping drawings, couldn't you rough out the animation in Flipbook then polish up the keys in Photoshop? I can imagine it would be tough to get clean in-betweens without some sort of onion skinning or "hot key" flipping between layers. I haven't used Flipbook enough to be too familiar with its' drawing tools. When I worked for Toonz Animation in NZ, we only use the back light for registration purposes. Everything else required flipping pages. We did that to actually see the movement happen while we worked. Their reasoning was that" the camera doesn't see things back lit, so to be accurate the light should be turned off". Made senses. Have you found an effective way of doing that digitally?

Mike Pelensky said...

Awesome, BJ! Really well done! Love the staging and posing of the drunk in particular.

BJ Crawford said...

Mike B

I have not tried to animate in Flipbook, but I believe you can (I've painted in flipbook, but imported all my scanned drawings).

I just used photoshop to roughly block out the subway drunk scene. It's not even really the direction I'll take the posing, it's just a way of warming up on a scene. It happens that the rough sketches I did for subway came out better than I thought, so I might end up using 2 or 3 of them. But anyways, I still do all my 2D animation on Ingram. And if you've animated on that paper, there's just no turning back! It's a great quality paper.