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Quasar14

Age 33, Male

Penn State University

Pennsylvania

Joined on 3/8/08

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You Need A Health Bar!

Posted by Quasar14 - March 12th, 2010


As I am typing this up, I am putting the finishing touches on my newest animation, "You Need A Health Bar!" and I thought I would briefly describe the process I used to create it for anyone interested. I guess this would count as my fourth real animation I have completed, and the second one I upload to Newgrounds (maybe I will get around to uploading one of my others someday just for gits and shiggles). Since you probably already watched it or are about to watch it, you can easily discern the fact that I am not the greatest Flash-user or artist around, but I feel that I put my entire soul into creating the best animation I possibly could and learned quite a bit from my mistakes along the way. It is not nearly as long as most of the others I have done, but YNAHB is definitely a step above what I have done previously in terms of quality, and I hope you will agree.

As with all my other animations, the first step I took was to write the script. This was one of the most enjoyable (i.e., least frustrating) parts of the process. After rereading it a number of times, there were a few scenes I decided to cut as I took into consideration how well they meshed in with what I already had and the limits to my own abilities as an artist and animator.

The next step was to draw out each of the backgrounds and characters. I will admit that I am not all that interested in the frame-by-frame model of animation (maybe someday when I have more time on my hands I will learn this fine art), so i drew up backgrounds that were usually large enough to cover whatever scene I was working on. The character art was also generic enough to be versatile in multiple situations so I would not have to hand-draw each frame of character movement. When beginning a character or background, I usually observed screenshots and official artwork for inspiration.

After I had most of the backgrounds and characters sketched with pencil and paper, I scanned those pages into the computer and imported them into Flash, where I traced them with my Wacom tablet. The style I used was quite unique compared to any other project I have done before, you can clearly see I used only black brush strokes to trace out the images. Throughout the animation, there are absolutely no lines visible whatsoever, and I really enjoyed this new way of drawing. This also opened a range of problems and frustrations, as other Flash users will know that the brush tool as a bit finicky at times. It was also difficult to create other poses for the characters without lines to manipulate (I often had to use the ink tool for this, deleting the lines later). To color the computer sketches, I used the dabber tool to extract the colors from actual in-game screenshots and I am happy the way they turned out.

Then came the part that I actually had to put it all together and animate it, but that's another story. I hope you enjoyed this animation, as I spent quite a bit of time completely dedicated to it. Feel free to send me a message if you have any tips, questions, or want to collaborate on a project sometime in the future!


Comments

You Should Start An Animation Series...