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Fraser Edwards
Fraser Edwards
Participant
December 7, 2017
Question

Looking for Feedback

  • December 7, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 711 views

I'm in the process of creating a pilot for an animated kids TV show based around a band of humanoid-sharks that play in a rock band.

I made this short video to start trying to get to grips with Character Animator and iron out the flaws before I start on the job of animating our full length pilot episode.

I'd appreciate any feedback anyone has. I'm currently using Photoshop as my base though I'd like to transfer the characters to Illustrator and learn how to get the lines in the characters a bit less sketchy (they were drawn by a comic book artist)

Thanks

Pride of Aberdeen Awards Acceptance Speech - YouTube

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    2 replies

    N
    NUDD
    Participant
    December 11, 2017

    Awesome!

    Wow, I think that the style overall matched really well. So characters and background were spot on. In my opinion, you don't really need to change that. BUT... who am I to tell you what to do, right

    I also liked your voice. And, since I had a quick look around your channel, I like the music!

    And overall it's a really good idea to turn that into a cartoon!

    Anyway. I have a few tips for you. Just minor things.

    I think an establishing shot at the beginning, so both sharks in picture facing each other, would have worked better. From that, you could have played with over shoulder perspective and focusing on each shark, when they talk. There are some great dialogue camera positioning tutorials on youtube. Worth a few hours of exploring.

    The transition between 0:25 and 0:27... In my opinion a simple cut to the next character would have worked better. It just feels unnatural to "move" the camera that slow. Look for that in Family Guy. They got this figured out.

    I don't like the slight movement of the whole character all the time. The more traditional style is "pose to pose". https://youtu.be/vVKmDLsnsiI?t=14m28s At 14:28 there is a small tutorial on how to "fix" this.

    Maybe some hand movement would be awesome and head movement in general.

    But I get that this is a test. And in my opinion you nailed that test pretty great!

    Just one small thing for you to think about. I don't know how long a full length episode will be. If you are new to animation and storytelling in general, keep it on the shorter side. At least for the first few episodes. It will give you time to learn everything and to not feel overwhelmed.

    Anyway, great job!

    I am now a subscriber and am looking forward to the first episode!

    Fraser Edwards
    Fraser EdwardsAuthor
    Participant
    December 15, 2017

    Thanks a lot for your feedback! I really appreciate you adding in the compliments with your criticism so that my ego doesn't take too much of a hit

    Unfortunately I don't have back of the head perspectives for these puppets as that would have been great to have kind of blurry and slightly in the foreground to create a better dialogue perspective. I will see if there is something I can do in order to implement some beneficial changes like this.

    The whole pose to pose thing I've not really looked at but having seen that tutorial and read your comments about pose to pose being the norm, I think i'll probably do that in future. I had smoothing on 100% because I was getting a very jerky look before, but I'll experiment with pose to pose and smoothing on 75% and see how that goes.

    I have a first episode written and it's about 10 minutes long so I'll see how I get on with that before doing anymore for sure. I wanna make sure it's as good as it can be to increase the chances of getting the pilot picked up by a production company/TV channel (kind of ambitious considering I've never done anything like this before but whatever haha!)

    I added some extra Character Animator dialogue sections in the new Sharky Sharky Lyric Video:

    https://youtu.be/is7t2DqdJb0?t=1m6s

    CoSA_DaveS
    CoSA_DaveS
    Participating Frequently
    December 11, 2017

    Looking good!

    For a more cartoony look, you could lower the frame rate to 24 fps, or even 12 fps.

    You can do this at any time, just select the scene in the project panel and adjust the rate rate in the properties panel. Play it back to see what you like the best.

    Fraser Edwards
    Fraser EdwardsAuthor
    Participant
    December 15, 2017

    Yes I have heard that animation is traditionally at 12fps, is it still done this way?

    One problem I was running into was everything looking a bit jerky, so I changed it from 24fps to 60fps in an attempt to make it smoother, not sure if this made much difference or maybe even made it worse

    CoSA_DaveS
    CoSA_DaveS
    Participating Frequently
    December 16, 2017

    > I have heard that animation is traditionally at 12fps, is it still done this way?

    I'd say most common is at 24 fps, with a lot of the drawing done "on 2s" which means they are shown for two frames in a row -- effectively 12 fps.

    60 fps will definitely be smoother, but because traditional cartoons are never created at that rate, it won't look like a traditional cartoon.

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