Month: February 2022

I was casually browsing the web today when I stumbled upon an animation blogger demonstrating how to make a transition animation where a pentagram is transformed into a character, which I found quite interesting.

The author first conceived a transformed form in the shape of a pentagram, then fused the girl’s image into the pentagram and drew the girl’s dynamics against the shape of the pentagram.

The movement is made to fit the shape of the pentagram as closely as possible. Keep contrasting the transformations.

The droplets of water waving in the girl’s hand grow larger and the girl’s form eventually liquefies into water.

The transition is perfect, with only eleven frames to achieve in a very smooth way. Well worth studying.

Recently a new animation was released in China – I Am What I Am – and I was intrigued by the opening: ink and water animation, which are quite a lot of animated transitions in just a minute and a half.

So I studied the rules of animation transitions in detail.

I separated these transitions into several categories: transformational push-pull-rotate, connected dynamics, and explosion transitions.

• Transformational push-pull-rotate have the advantage of adding storytelling to the narrative, most often through the eyes of the character into another story, and can be used for things like reminiscence and double identity transitions, which have a propulsive effect on the story.

• Connected dynamics can bring strong dramatic tension to animation, using the dynamics of what the characters are doing to seamlessly segue to the next scene, so smoothly that transitions are overlooked and add a montage effect to the film.

• Explosion transitions are very popular in short films, as the advantage of explosions is that they can quickly cover the entire frame for a switch, whether with flash, smoke or broken objects. For short opening credits or transitions, they can give the audience a quick and powerful sensory stimulus.

The teacher Steve used body language to express the way the animated character should speak, for example, the body should not always be moving when saying a sentence, but should follow the rhythm of the words and then move the body after the sentence.

At first, I didn’t really understand what the teacher said about lips animation, and I had no experience in this area, I just knew to change the two poses according to the sound, so I spent a day drawing the following mouth animation.

Yes, it was awful, the whole animation looked very strange and stiff, I started to think about what went wrong, firstly I think I drew a very complicated head, which made it very difficult to animate the whole thing, there was so much movement in the hair part that I just wanted to give up as soon as I started the middle frames.

The facial muscles didn’t follow the shape of the mouth at all, which meant that the facial contours didn’t follow the expressions, making the image very stiff.

Steve’s advice to me after seeing my animation was not to start with a clean sheet, but to sketch with the pencil tool and draw more lines on each line, which was very helpful. I used to waste a lot of time trying to get a perfect line, which made it difficult to add intermediate frames, but I applied Steve’s method to my subsequent animation drawings and found that I drew faster and could draw more at the same time than before.

So I picked up the brush again and started a new version, this time I simplified the character and added the body, also the speech rhythm, I put more thought into the expressions, I wanted to exaggerate the expressions of the character and added a lot of intermediate frames, each frame was not repeated, I cleared all the frames and redraw them.

I found that the result was much more vivid and interesting, there were so many more frames than in the first draft of the animation and the movements were more consistent.

This was a little exercise for a storyboard class. I think because of the time I didn’t express too clearly the emotions of the story reversal and the surprise of the characters, I could have added some body movements to show the surprise, used darker tones of light and shadow to show the mystery of the man so that the audience didn’t know where the man was, and finally a big plot reversal. But all in all this little animation exercise was great fun! It allowed me to draw a quick and clear version of the story and I will be practising more in the future.