Hello my fellow Steemians! Today I want to go over the process of making an animated film using my own animated short film Jurassic Park meets Alien. I'll go through my process and how I went from nothing but storyboards to a short animated film and show you my steps through production.
Making an animated film requires patience. You're not gonna be able to just turn out a film even a short film in a couple weeks. Animation takes time and the more time you spend on the animation usually the better the final product. Animated films are a work of love and hate. Part of you absolutely loves what you're doing and you feel inspired and you're cranking through your film like nobody's business but then it hits you. That wave of hate where you're so sick of looking at character designs, painting the same location over and over again for 3 shots, fixing your previous frames, you wanna smash your tablet and never do animation again....
...but...that's just part of the game and when you win the game, when you release that animation you've spent 2 years working on that made you cry, sweat, and bleed that's when you shout to the world, "I FUCKING DID IT" or if you're on a team "WE FUCKING DID IT". Be proud maybe even a bit narcissistic because you've done something absolutely incredible!
So now I know what you're thinking, "Anima I'm gonna pick up my pen and start animating right now" and to that I say slow down there, there's a lot of steps that go into animation. Today we'll do an in depth run down of all the stages of production on an animated film!
The first thing you have to do for an animated film is come up with an idea. What's going to happen in this film? What are the themes? Whats the genre? Am I teaching someone a lesson? Am I telling a story or just a sequence playing out in my head? What should the characters look like? Where is the story taking place? These are questions you have to ask yourself at the beginning of the production process. Who, what, when, where, why, and how are general questions your animation should answer. Make sure to brainstorm your ideas on a piece of paper or write them down somewhere. These ideas are going to build your characters and story.
Below is a quick list of ideas I came up with before starting my storyboard.
Now before we can start our storyboard we need do do character designs. We want to know what our character looks like and create character sheets to use to animate from them. Character sheets can be as simple as a rough sketch to a full blown painting. Here's the painting I did to use as reference.
After getting our character sheet(s) together we can finally start on the storyboard. This will tell our team or ourselves what the general direction of the story is. It will also give us a guide to start animating. Storyboards are the building blocks of an animated film. Below you can see part of my storyboard for my animated film.
Since I'm on my own team I draw a storyboard that I can easily read and make mental note for scenes that may not be as understandable.
And now finally the moment you've been waiting for. Personally my favorite part of animating the rough animation itself! The rough animation is going to be the muscles of your animation. This is what we build upon to lead us to the final stages of production but this is also the most tedious step as it will take you months maybe years to finish the rough animation. Below are a couple clips of rough animation from my animated film.
Now we can move to the line art stage. The stage where you'll either be ripping your hair out from boredom or you will casually glide through it like a leaf on the wind. Line art is what you will see in the final product. Be aware though you can also go line less if you're doing a stylized film. Personally I dislike line art because it doesn't really require me to use my brain and I just get bored of it very quickly. It's basically tracing over your rough animation. Some people like it while others don't. After you've finished your line art you can finally start coloring/shading. This is where your character sheet should come in handy and you can use it to your advantage. For coloring effects and not characters I tend to try to pick colors that match the palette I'm working with. This will be crucial to making the colors match and the animated film to look uniform.
You're almost there! The next step is my second favorite process and that is backgrounds. Backgrounds appear in pretty much 100% of your animated film. Backgrounds tell us the location and even the time of day. I start my backgrounds with a simple layout. Below I've posted the Background's original layout and the finished version.
You're almost there! Do you taste it, do you taste that sweet sweet triumph against all the odds!
The next step is sound design. What kind of sounds do you want to use for your project? Do you want music? How are you going to set the mood? Sound design is important because it conveys emotions and tells a story just like the animation does. Every aspect of your animation is basically telling a story from the music, to the backgrounds, to the animation itself. Remember that!
Finally there is compositing. Make you animation look nice, add those lens flares, ramp up those glows, make those snazzy water effects, there's so many different routes to take with compositing. Have fun!
FINALLY YOU'VE DONE IT! You've completed your animated film/animation. You can upload it everywhere! Show your family and friends! Show your coworkers! Let the world know what you've done. Be proud!
Below is my animated film Jurassic Park Meets Alien.
I hope this helped anyone wanting to make their own animated film. I wish you all the best and can't wait to see what you come up with!