Handdrawn animation

[Rasheed]

Although AS is not very well suited to create handdrawn animation, you can do it. Here's a method that works.

But why would you want to draw animation by hand, if vector drawing offers so much more control? Well, handdrawn animation has a spontaneity which is hard to reproduce with vector animation. And handdrawn animation is the most basic and direct form of animation. You see exactly what you draw. There is no manipulation or limitation by software.

In Photoshop, Gimp, or any other similar image editor, create as many image layers as there will be keys in your animation. Now do the following for each layer, starting with the lowest layer for frame 1:

1. draw your frame in the current layer
2. change the transparency of the current layer to 50%
3. select to the next higher layer as the current layer
4. if there are more than two layers visible, make the lowest of the layers invisible

After you've done all frames, change the transparency of all layers to 100%. Now export each layer by making only one layer visible and export as 32-bit PNG file (24-bit RGB with alpha channel). Name the files sequentially (IMG0001.PNG, IMG0002.PNG, etc.).

Import the PNG files with the image sequence import script (Scripts -> Image -> Import Image Sequence), and rescale the animation (Animation -> Rescale Keyframes) for the Switch Layer animation channel, and drag the keys in the channel so it animates correctly. Copy keys if you want to animate a repeating sequence.

Draw the animation in your favorite image editor first with outlines only, as a line test. If this line test is correct, fill the outlines for each image. Make sure all files have the same width and height, so there will be no errors in the registration of the frames. You can always resize the switch layer in AS to combine handdrawn animation and other types of animation and stills.



Now, if you want to trace the images, go right ahead. However, there will always be some loss of quality and spontaneity of the straight ahead animation.

Here's some other animation:

[Genete]

It is the way it has been done from the begining of animation. But for that kind of work AS is only a replacement of the final video compositor.

I'm sorry Rasheed but for me (linux user) this method don't give me any help because I have to export the animation to a image sequence AGAIN so pass it through AS have not added value.

Anyway you have reason when you say

Now, if you want to trace the images, go right ahead. However, there will always be some loss of quality and spontaneity of the straight ahead animation.

So traditional animation will last!

[rylleman]

I don't think this is an effective technique to do hand drawn frame by frame animation, but you can definitely make use of it in one way or the other.
I did in one film intergrate hand drawn animation created in Photoshop CS with Moho-animation with satisfying result.

To make it a bit easier there are a very basic but functional animation feature in photoshop CS, with that you don't have to fiddle with layer transparency and stuff.

When in Moho, instead of using import image sequence you can use my Loop Switch script, it will give you a little bit more control over your frames. Just import all your images into one switch layer and run the script.

[cribble]

Another thing i've seen someone do with Flash is export the lines of the animation, print them out and then the animator traced over it and coloured in etc, re imported it back into flash and did a final export of it. I've only seen this at a festival and can't find a link to it, but it i guess the same principles can be applied to AS. Plus with the ease of animating in AS it can drastically improve speed.

[Rasheed]

I understand that there are a lot of disadvantages to the method I proposed, the most important being that you'll need to be able to draw consistently, otherwise your character goes "off model". With Moho/AS this isn't so much a problem, because you can invest a lot of time in a good model and keep it consistent throughout the animation scene. With handdrawn animation, your character has to be "on model" in every frame. I guess this means that creating animation this way takes a lot of time and testing.

I also noticed that it is still much easier to drawn with pencil and paper than with stylus and tablet. The disconnect between what you see and where you draw is still hard to deal with, at least for me. Perhaps that a solution with a touch screen and stylus will make the disconnect less noticeable, but those solutions are currently far beyond my budget.

The lack of a video output in Linux has always puzzled me, because you'll always need a compositor to make a movie out of the image sequence. There doesn't seem to be a standard media format available (like QuickTime on the Apple platform, or Windows Media on the Windows platform). Until someone develops such a solution, Linux users can't really do video editing out of the box. It's like the old DOS days for the PC.

The solution of creating rough animation with AS, using the output as a reference to drawn by hand, is perhaps a good method for the not so accomplished draftsmen among us. The problem that I see is that the animation becomes rather mechanical and loses life if you even loosely attempt to trace the output from AS. The output needs, so to speak, to be pinned to the wall to resist the temptation to trace.