A friend of mine, who was studying a film degree, was making a short documentary about a previous lecturer he had and asked me to animate some scenes for him. I was happy to agree.
This is documented in one post at the end of the project.
Most of our communication was via Discord
After receiving and reading the brief, and five photos to use as reference, I started by brainstorming and testing an art style to use in the documentary.
As stated in the brief, I wanted to keep it predominately black and white with a signature colour for the main two. From the reference photos I simplified the hairstyle and glasses shape to make it easier to differentiate between them and the other characters. Some other, but more subtle, differences is the size of the highlight in their eyes and the shape of their nose. The bottom right corner is a test for written text that would appear on screen.
I genuinely meant that. It’s really helpful to have something as a template or starting point because if I was asked to come up with what to draw on my own, on the one hand- the creative freedom is wonderful, but on the other- I could come up with five different versions of the same shot and wouldn’t be able to decide on just one.
He made a document for the story board, with an illustration and small description at the bottom of each shot. Each week it was updated with more as he drew them, and I sent back the completed shots when I’d finished them.
In the end, the total number of shots I animated was about 25, but that doesn’t include the few shots which were just for text or the title.
All of these shots were simply four pictures every four frames and went on for about one second, mostly so they could easily loop to however long he needed the shot to be. For the ones which had a main action or motion, I made sure there was capacity for a loop at either the beginning or end of the clip.