Inbetweening is generally used in traditional 2D animation, key animators animating the key frames and the inbetweeners filling in the gaps between them, creating a more fluid action. Key animators often leave timing charts for the inbetweeners to follow, showing how many frames should be between one frame and the next. This made up time for studio sand allowed aspiring animators to work in big studios next to big animators.
I worked with Rachel, giving her my key frames for a walk cycle, and she in turn gave me her own key frames to inbetween. I wanted to create a walk that had character in its movement, not just its decoration, unlike my previous walk cycles, so I started by trying to sketch out a character that might have an interesting walk, or have their personality come out from within it.
I ended up settling on this pirate, I thought she would be confident and relaxed as a captain, wearing recognisable clothing that would add to her stride. Big heavy boots could potentially add more purpose to her walk. I started on transforming the sketches to a moving character first in a rough digital loop made in Photoshop using the timeline window.
I started with the body shape and then added the coat and the hat afterwards in the brighter colour. I watched videos of models wearing big coats going down the catwalk as a reference for how the coat could move. I wanted her to be holding a gun at her belt but didn't end up adding that detail in the test or the final outcome. I ended up not including the hat and feather in the final keyframes either as I ran out of time but it could have been a nice addition to the secondary movement in her walk.
I then went on to draw it out traditionally, just focusing on the body to make it simpler and not to have put a lot of time into it before seeing whether it worked or not. I only have a test filmed on my phone of this stage and the lighting isn't very good but it does show what the animation was like at this stage:
The next stage was adding the coat's movement, I followed my test to make sure I was heading in the right direction, with the fabric flapping with the movements of the body. I only have the low quality test of these key frames (excluding two of the extremes from the heavy step as I wasn't sure about it at the time of this test) that I filmed on my phone, similar to the test before. It does show where I had gotten to before Rachel added the inbetweens to make it smoother, however.
Here is the final version of the walk with the inbetweens added by Rachel:
I then inbetweened for Rachel, she had made a similar walk cycle with a slight slouch in her character's posture, I found it a challenge as Rachel's style is much neater than mine, with fine line work, I always have to sketch out proportions before going into detail on anything and often let the sketch lines remain. I think I managed to meet that style well but could have inbetweened better to make a smoother change from the different head heights throughout the cycle. The highest point of the head looks like it's suddenly jumped into during the animation whilst the rest looks smoother.
I do really like Rachel's style and might try to create something with similar neat line work in the future, perhaps in a digital medium waste less paper and make it easier to go over errors.
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