Вы когда-нибудь пытались запустить анимацию с нуля без какого-либо планирования? Если у вас есть, это, вероятно, закончилось катастрофой. Когда аниматоры получают идею, они испытывают искушение погрузиться прямо в игру и начать рисовать кадр за кадром вручную или в программном обеспечении для анимации. Чаще всего проект заканчивает тем, что отклонился от проторенного пути без понятия, куда это идет. Замедление не доставляет большого удовольствия, но в итоге оно спасет ваши проекты. Попробуйте выполнить следующие пять шагов, прежде чем приступить к следующей анимации, и вы увидите, как подготовка к изменениям влияет на ваши проекты.
Знай свою историю
Многие люди, особенно начинающие, погружаются в анимацию с идеей, но без реальной истории. Хотя каждая история начинается с концепции, вам нужно написать все, чтобы понять, куда движется анимация. Возможно, вам придется внести последние изменения в историю, когда вы столкнетесь с ограничениями или проблемами, но эта базовая структура все еще существует. Напишите повествование или сценарий с указанием направления сцены, заметок о панорамировании, масштабировании и углах обзора. Планируйте каждую деталь. Вам понадобится ваш план позже.
Знай своих персонажей
Don’t just do one quick sketch of your characters. Do several and not just one or two facial shots. Draw them full body from several angles. Draw them at rest. Draw them moving. Draw them angry and draw them happy. Draw the way their hands move as they’re speaking. Draw the finer details of their piercings or tattoos, or the weird designs on their T-shirts. Render them in color. Create full character sheets.
If you have inanimate objects that appear in the scene, draw them too — especially if they’re moving objects such as cars or spaceships. This helps you a lot later during the animation process. Creating character sheets helps you formalize this process, and you can use them as a reference later. You’d be surprised how far they go in lending consistency and regularity to your animations. Not only that, but they also help you render your characters in as few lines as possible to cut out excess work.
Plan Your Scenes
Unless you’re animating a one-scene short, you’ll have several different scenes in your animation. Take a look at your story or script. Mark where one scene ends and the next begins. Then sit down and identify the requirements of each scene — how many characters are in each, what backgrounds you need, and the kind of music or voice-overs you require.
Create a storyboard detailing scene action, camera action, effects, and colors. Make the words of your story or script into images with clear directions. Creating visual instructions for yourself forms the framework guiding you throughout the animation process.
Map out Your Timing
Proper timing is essential to animation. Not everything moves at the same speed; running X distance won’t require the same number of frames as walking X distance. If you animate a cheetah leaping but pick X number of arbitrary frames to fill in between your keyframes, you may leave your cheetah floating slowly through the air or hurtling at deadly speeds. Not only that, but not all motion continues at the same speed.
Sometimes there’s an ease in and ease out, such as the wind-up for a baseball pitch. You’ll also likely be working with time constraints. How long do you want your animation to be? What can be cut to fit into those time constraints? Knowing these things helps you create dope sheets mapping out the frames you need to draw.
Create a Workflow and a Project Plan
By now, you probably have a clear idea of the work you need to do for your animation. Write that information down. Decide the order you’ll complete each stage of the project and your methodology. Practice a little discipline and stick to your plan. Set a timeline, especially if you’re working on a deadline for someone else. Work out how much time you need for each part within realistic expectations, and then break down how you’ll allow that time over X number of days.
Following these guidelines won’t make you a perfect animator, but they’ll keep you on track and help you establish a professional working process.