So, I decided (just like any other normal-minded individual), to create a derpy Pikachu and rig / animate it!
However this A.E. Quickie was not just a Quickie for Pokemon's sake, but actually an applied technique of mine that I have been studying and improving upon.
One of my goals as an After Effects technical animator is to make After Effects look more organic. After Effects suffers from what I call the 'Tasty Spam' treatment, it can taste good, but it's so processed and fake. A lot of modern animation is so heavily computerized these days, it's to the point where everything just starts to look too processed (much like spam!) and loses that human artistic quality; the error, roughness and uniqueness frame-per-frame. The Japanese have a term for this, they call it Wabi-Sabi. The art of imperfection. There is just something so right about something that is wrong, and that is what is missed in animation today. Animation today is gone through a sterile computer pipeline where everything from line work, color to animation is clean-cut and totally virtual, if there's an imperfection, CTRL+Z! I think I'll make a blog post on the explanation of these ideas, the history of it and what I am trying to do - stay tooned.
Of course, having animation on computers isn't all-bad. Heck my background is in software engineering as well as animation, so I have to give computers some love.
What I want to do is marry the organic feel of how hand drawn animation looks, with the speed and ease of a computer-based animation pipeline.
Of course, having animation on computers isn't all-bad. Heck my background is in software engineering as well as animation, so I have to give computers some love.
What I want to do is marry the organic feel of how hand drawn animation looks, with the speed and ease of a computer-based animation pipeline.
So What I have done with this animation (or A.E. Quickie) is a combination of ideas to make the sequence (or at least the assets, I know the animation isn't that great) look more organic. I first went with the line work as it is important. A human redraws each frame in a traditionally animated sequence and with each frame that is redrawn there is a minor variable of error in the line (the thickness of the line, the straightness and opacity) which as been applied to the animation below. As well as other intrinsic variables such as the texture of cell paper and opacity differences of inking each frame. All of these ideas were applied to the Pikachu animation sequence.
There will be more to this as I study and improve this technique, such as animating (or rendering) on 2's much like traditional animations are done, and figure out / create a plugin to remove motion blur and interpolate in-betweens for frames to give it that nice squash / stretch look.
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