"Vacation" hand-drawn animation. The process.

I recently had a conversation about hand-drawn animation, and it reminded me of the feeling of working on an actual lightbox, flipping those pieces of paper back and forth, and trying to get that line just right. And so that same day while on the bus I came up with the idea for a short animation, sketched my character, and then made pencil keys once I got home.

I didn't do the whole rough animation on the lightbox since I don't have the right kind of a hole puncher, and had to constantly hold down paper while trying to animate that way. After a while it really got to me, and I switched to Animate/ Flash. Character and follow-through roughs and then final line went much easier from that point on, but the computer process also took away that magical feeling of a pencil touching paper, which, I think, is one reason why people decide to draw in the first place - it just feels good!

I am being sentimental about these things some times but I'm still an artist more than a fetishist, so I continued my animation labors to render out Animate-final-lined-and-colored piece so I can work on details in Photoshop. There I added some ripples, gradients, and textures so that I could freely import this Frankenstein's monster into After Effects to finish up. And in AE I added more grain, simple phone animation, and went on to composite the pieces together in Premiere Pro.

So here it is! The time for this piece was about three days (on and off).

Here I'm posting the actual piece and composited stages below.

Pencil keys on my fairly mobile lightbox.

Below are stages of work including pencil keys, rough animation, final line, color and post production.