So I’ve identified what I think were the two most glaring problems for me when it comes to making animations. And now it’s time for me to give myself some activities to do and hopefully make some improvements for the future.
Drawing Humans
For this, I need to draw people from different angles and do some studies on the particular body parts that give me some problems to draw out. Either draw people I see in real life, perhaps random people I see on the street or people I know more personally. Or look at reference photographs. I think I’ve seen some site that help people to draw by supplying them with slides of photos to study certain features. Also I should definitely read some books on drawing. I’ve got a particularly good one just sitting on my shelf that I’ve heard mentioned by someone before who was struggling with drawing. Called, “Everyone Can Draw”. There’s some really decent drawing studies in it so it’s worth checking out. I should also look more into “construction”. There are ways that professional animators draw shapes for the face and create a mask and what not so everything is more consistent. I’ve watched one of my favourite YouTube channel’s talking about it numerous times but it always put me off because it either seemed too complicated, or it didn’t work the first time I tried it.
Plan Animations out first with an Animatic
This one is more simple. Stop myself jumping ahead too quick and make an animatic of what I want first. it stops me from tearing my hair out, running into problems when I’m heavily invested in a project that could potentially pop up. It also means I plot out the real work more carefully before actually animating anything that takes up more of the time. It’s also a much better way to go back and change or correct something I might not be happy with some days or weeks later. So to start off, it may be work checking out examples of other people’s animatics to know what kind of work I need to do for it.
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