Some Tests

Seemed to me the only way to answer some of the difficult questions about how long it'll take, how much it'll cost, and what it'll look like to make Ruby into a Flash cartoon was to start doing it. Over the last couple of days, whenever I could find some time, I've been knocking out a short scene; 11 seconds of Ruby having some trouble lighting her cigarette.

Here's the process I envisioned. It starts with a stage I call the "Scribble Pass"

You could also call this "rough animation". This took me five hours to do.

It's a little hard to tell what's going on in this tiny movie. The idea is she's looking tough and cool as she takes a cigarette from behind her ear, but she drops it. It falls down her dress, but in her attempt to catch it she slams her head on her desk. She sees stars briefly (metaphorically, it's not that kind of cartoon), takes the cigarette out of her cleavage and lights it. She looses her cool one more time in a coughing fit but redeems herself in the end with a sultry look to the camera.

Here's where we have a choice. What I'd prefer to do at this stage with enough time and money is a traditional "assist". Add smoothness and details and basically make the animation clear enough for a clean up artist. The alternative I've been imagining is to "Flash-ify" the assist stage. That is, to break the elements of the character up into pieces, put each on it's own level and "cheat" the in-betweens in Flash. That's what I've done.

I'm calling this the "Flash Pass".

And I'm hating it!

It took me 10 more hours to take it to this stage and I would still call it far from complete. If I'm going to make myself happy with the animation I'm going to have to spend probably a lot of time nudging and tweaking all those tweens around. I'd also anticipate a certain amount of frame by frame fixes. Stuff like making sure the joints meet up just right. I also wouldn't be surprised to find a number of mistakes, like stuff being on the wrong layer.

What I'm trying to say is it's not looking like this process is the big time and money saver I'd hoped.

I'm going to try to continue this process. I think it's wielding some good hard information that will serve us well in discussions with Aniboom.

Another test I've started involves the "post" process. I took a cell from the original short and went through the process of reproducing it in Flash. Here's the result:
The clean up, paint, and tones were all pretty easy to do. Much faster and easier in fact than the original process. I'm still interested in bringing this into After Effects and figuring out how to soften or "chunk up" the vector line a bit, so it doesn't look so vector like. And I want to try to develop a process for giving it more of the look of a painted cell shot under a camera. (Maybe I'd get the best results painting cells and shooting them under a camera) I haven't done any work on that yet, but that's my goal. (Basically to obscure the crappy animation with a bunch of digital filters!)