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I love process talk so if you'll bear for a bit with me I wanna thread the making of this one particular scene and the cheats employed to keep it alive and entertaining without doing too many drawings. 1/ https://twitter.com/BakersCousins/status/1361009854911975427
I LOVE limited animation. I think there's a charm to it that's missing when things are fluidly animated and fully inbetweened. I also come from a storyboarding background and have no training in traditional animation, so to make Bakers I us this "meet-in-the-middle" philosophy
I was also a board artist on an insane show where you're expected to animate your boards (don't do this) so to survive I developed cheats. Warping drawings, duplicating drawings and nudging them, adding cycles, anything that takes very little time to do yet looks "animated"
Strangely enough, those cheats are really effective in developing a look for Bakers Dozen. Using these techniques (cheats) we have a style that "feels" animated yet doesn't actually take a lot of drawing/passes/tiedowns to do, and best of all, can be done quickly.
So for this scene, because I knew it was gonna be a bit complex, I had a rough blocking of what it's going to look like, where the elements are etc so I can start my planning. It's all in my head but it pretty much looked like this - there's also a lot of tweaking at the end
Set priorities in elements that move. In every scene there should be a primary movement, seconday, tertiary, etc. This way the movements don't compete with each other. If you have a scene with 2 primary movements, your eyes are split 2ways. One of them must take lower priority.
I'm sure this is an animation principle of some sort that everyone knows (like, DUH) but I'm a caveman and I figured out a lot of these through brute force and trials and errors so forgive me for not being very articulate about it
Anyway, I actually decided that for this scene, Maddie is my primary: Her movement cycle is going to determine Suzette's movement cycle (secondary), which then determines the foreground tentacle (tertiary). The ship and the kraken are way low priority (quaternary)
So I started Maddie with just TWO (2) drawings: her at the top and her at the bottom - those are the two strongest poses and if you're just doing storyboards these are the only 2 drawings you need. The panic sweats and impact debris were added later after the movement works
To create variation, I broke up the drawing into 2 layers: 1) the body and 2) the legs. This way I can change the leg poses without affecting the body. I could break it up into even more pieces but that's too much work and she's in the background so nobody's gonna really care.
For the bottom, since it's an impact, I duplicated the drawing and then just SQUISHED it down vertically and then added impact debris. It's literally the same drawing duplicated then squished. Took an extra few seconds to do with the impact stuff
For the top, I took the same drawing and just nudged it with easing on the spacing (spacing gets closer as you get to the highest point). No additional drawing! Just nudge things around with your arrow key!
does it look stiff? of course it does, so I added the panic sweat as a way to juxtapose some "life" into it. There's something really charming to me about nudged held drawings combined with a frantic cycle. This is something a lot of folks on the internet has done via GIFs.
The point is, you actually get A LOT out of little things like the cycle of panic sweat and the nudging even though really, you only drew ONE (1) DRAWING. The cycles/nudge only took less than 10% of the drawing time, but does more than 90% of the work in keeping it alive.
Anyway, now that you have all of that, you can see how it plays with even timing and decide whether you need some inbetweens. I think this is real funny but I did feel I need to soften the middle a bit so it's not too jarring, especially since she's in the background.
So I did 3 inbetweens:
1) a warp of the maddie @ top drawing
2) a pose of maddie @ bottom getting lifted (at extra pose at the bottom makes her feel heavier)
3) another pose as she's getting lifted with the legs trailing (leg pose variation! all according to plan!)
1) a warp of the maddie @ top drawing
2) a pose of maddie @ bottom getting lifted (at extra pose at the bottom makes her feel heavier)
3) another pose as she's getting lifted with the legs trailing (leg pose variation! all according to plan!)
ONE inbetween for the downward movement, TWO inbetween for the upward movement - this makes it feel like she's being slammed down faster than she's being lifted up. If there's the same number of poses on either direction it makes it too even. Variation is good.
I think animator folks talk about "timing" - I honestly never understood what it means and no matter how hard I study up I can't seem to wrap my head around it. My caveman workaround is that I'll keep them all in 1s or 2s and just add poses as necessary. I think it's the same? ??
The nice thing about animation is that there's really no right or wrong way of approach. There's a lot of philosophies and techniques out there you can arm yourself with, but really I think the best philosophy is: just keep playing around with it until it feels good
Anyway, that's it. Now you know all of my secrets. Take the same thought process and apply it to Suzette - two extreme poses (spatula up, spatula side), warp them to ease, two smear inbetween (one going each way) to indicate movement. Add little smack flairs.
Put them together!
1) Let them hit their extreme poses at the same time (rhythm! makes it easy to read)
2) But use opposite poses (spatula up / maddie down - spatula side / maddie up)
3) add "stagger" (either one moves first, don't let them both start moving at the same time)
1) Let them hit their extreme poses at the same time (rhythm! makes it easy to read)
2) But use opposite poses (spatula up / maddie down - spatula side / maddie up)
3) add "stagger" (either one moves first, don't let them both start moving at the same time)
Once you're happy with these two movements, the rest follows. The tentacle Maddie is attached to follows her up and down movement, the tentacle Suzette is fighting with "leads" the spatula swing, meaning it extends at Suzette the panel before her smear swing.
That's it! Hope this is interesting to anyone else other than me, haha. My brain is weird and it can't stop thinking so this kinda stuff is actually very healthy for my brain to hyperfocus on so that it doesn't spiral into dark thoughts.
