Hi,
As I mentioned before, I wanted to share some more of my process making Merchant Maiden since I think that it had a really simple setup that gave it some nice results and was surprisingly easy to put together.
I started by creating a sketch for the merchant tent interior, there was no animatic or storyboarding for making this since it is so much of the same shot throughout I figured i'd just dive right in and make it up along the way for the most part.
I then polished this design up using a pixel jagged kind of brush to strike a balance between retro game graphics and fluid digital art.
and then sorted out a background using a 3 frame loop that 'boiled' the artwork. This just means that by redrawing the background as close to the previous frame as possible it slightly wobbles and feels like it's breathing.
Next I sorted out the customer design as he is another hugely prominent piece of artwork used in the animation, notice how with the exception of the hands rolling the coin and the guy getting zapped to death there is very little in the way of actual movement. As with the Merchant, I just create a layer and create a new keyframe for each attempt, the onion skin tool then lets me keep aspects of the previous design if I like a certain feature. Some animations I've ended up with about 50 frames of a slowly morphing design just from struggling to get the design right.
As is evident here, I start very very simple with essentially a doodle just to get my head in the right space.
Finally I compiled all these elements into premiere pro each on a layer which I then updated as I would export and overwrite progress as I completed each element
Now for the close up shot, I was inspired Monkey Island which had these close up shots of characters that always looked quite charming in a corny kind of way to me.
To achieve this kind of effect I scaled my canvas way down to about 250x250 with 72 dpi in clip studio paint and then I found what might be the perfect face model for my suspicious looking thief
Loosely tracing over Mr Dafoe, I then had a great reference for the sort of bone structure and a general idea of the lighting as well which I then refered to my finalised customer character design for the final phase of this close up which I drew with a pixel style pen.
So a lot of this animation was very simple really, my customer hardly moved, I had small bit of animation on the hands that looped and the only other complicated elements were the close up, for how fiddly drawing a detailed pixel face multiple times over to make it boil was, and also the guy getting sucked into an amulet and disintegrating because... well yeah.
A quick breakdown of that guy getting destroyed. I animated it straight ahead and started kind of sketchy and went from there. A lot of the time for a sequence like this I draw a new frame every 8 frames transforming or morphing the guy or victim or whatever and then I inbetween the frames so it's on 4's, then 2's. Doing a pure straight ahead frame by frame for something with so many moving parts would risk things flying of course so this method works for more quite nicely.
That covers what is quite a huge chunk of the process, the great thing about this cartoon was that I could really lean into the simple lofi aesthetic and just not animate certain things like the customer walking to the stand. This gave me time to focus on style, sound design and animation scenes with lots of frames like the disintergating guy which was fun to work on.
Its actually completely reframed how I think of these cartoons, I think animating and putting energy towards what has value to me as the person making it is important and anything I feel isn't necessary usually has a stylistic compromise.
That's all for now, got some 3d stuff to show tomorrow most likely so check in for that ;0 - my shift key is broken so ;0 is all i can type for a smiley face until i fix my keyboard tomorrow lol
thanks as always and chat tomorrow1 ;0