Day 3: Finally finished a 2 second shooting cannon sequence. 15 drawings in all- the cannon cocks up, shoots a cannon ball (duh!), does a jump for a recoil & falls apart. This would have been a flash if I had used a Flash MX (PC program). But when it comes to pen & paper its like manufacturing a cannon. The scene showed the cannon centred & lenghtwise; it had a wheel too. The fuse burns out, the cannon cocks up in a staggering fashion & shoots wonderfully... Look Ma no hands! But the X-Factor that screwed this piece was the wheel. The wheel had to respond to the cocking cannon by squashing itself, this took a day to get right. I found that sqashing & skewing it corrected the problem. Next phase recoil. For the recoil I had to rely on my sense of timing, i.e, "BE ONE WITH THE CANNON" (echo effect). Got that part fantastically wrong. The cannon looked like it floated back along an arc after shooting. So I had to decrease the arc radius & VOILA!! cannon shoots & recoils!
A line test is a preliminary movie of the rough drawings, that comprises the animation. Line tests save a lot of time & pain when it comes to getting the desired actions right. Sometimes the actions look almost right but ur eye lingers on this one 'thing'. U play the footage at different speeds & still don't get a clue abt whats going wrong. This explains the 3 days for the 2 sec cannon blast.
Next comes the part that sucks. Clean up! Its a painstaking process of neatly tracing out the rough drawings for the final shoot. We had this instructor, Sudeep. He claimed that he sucked at clean-up & hired people to do it for him. In his words " For this u need patience. Its a womans' job".
Concentration is tantamount. Tomorrow, must remember to kick Vikas's ass before beginning drawings. He happens to be the local hyperactive pest. Speaking of kicks, have u noticed that Charlie Chaplin movies had awesome kicks. The kicks where normal but the affect was devastating on the big brute's posterior. What actually happened was this, the actors acted really well, they had to exagerate actions as it was a comedy & u had no sound for the movies then. They kicked in such a way it compensated for the lack of sound too. But what made it funny was the reduced frame rate. The time delay between kick & effect on ass was very small. This also explains the walks in those movies, they were fast. Accepted frame rate today is 24 frames per second i.e, 24 drawings or stills per second.
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