Collab Project 3- Day 39

Having done the jump animation, I believe all that is needed for the main character is a death animation. I'm going to try and show the whole process I go through for my animations since I've only shown bits so far.

Step 1

I start in Photoshop. Photoshop allows you to have both animation frames and layers. When trying to animate in GIMP2, your frames are your layers so it can be quite awkward to do. I add in a frame from one of my previous animations for a bit of a guide.

Next I try to sketch out the animation. This can take a while to get right, so I check with Laura and Mike to see what they think. Some animations can take longer than others to do, simply because it can take a while during the sketch stage to get things to look right.
Sometimes I'll repeat the frames at the end of an animation when showing it to the others. This is because the animation loops continuously so adding more frames gives a small pause at the end.

Step 2

This is the animation thus far:

 Next I'll take this over to Paint Tool SAI, a program I use alot at home. I like using Sai, it's quite easy to use and for this protect I use the vector tool that Sai has. This makes nice smooth lines that I can click and move around, so editing and tweaking the animation is easy.
Plus it accepts and exports .pdf's, so I can easily switch between Sai and Photoshop. Sai doesn't have the ability to animate so I switch between the two programs frequently to check how the animation looks.
In Sai, I first start with just black lining the sketch.

Step 3

By using a technique called onion skinnning, in which I lower the opacity of each of the frames, I can see all the frevious to the one I'm working on. Exported back into photoshop to animate, the black lines look like this:

After another check with the others, I'll start to add colour. I can add colour in either program, but I tend to use Sai. If the animation ever needs eiting at a later date I'll do so in Sai, so having the colour in Sai would save me having to re-colour each frame in photoshop every time.