Producing an Animated Short

I'm the kind of person who loves the process of how things are made. When I used to paint, I was more into stretching canvas, mixing paints, and brush strokes, than actual concept or theory. Those things just seemed to get in the way of the bliss one receives when you're lost in the act of making something. With animation its the same way. People go on and on about theory and purpose, when all I want is to take an idea and bring it to life.

For this particular project my method is something I've wanted to do for years but have yet to fully realize. The idea is very simple, make a basic model in 3d, animate it, then draw on top of the frames to produce the final look. This is not a new idea, Disney experimented with it in the late 80's/early 90's. I've also seen this method executed extremely well in an animated short called the The Pearce Sisters. The idea of rotoscoping has been around since the inception of animation.

So I don't claim to be developing an entirely new way of animating. Rather, I see it as taking an established method, and applying my own style to it. Of course this "style" is an amalgamation of things I've seen from other animators through out my life, so the idea of ownership of this creativity can not be mine alone. I'm starting sound like one of those theorists, so I will digress.

The tech-specs are as follows: I'm using a copy of Autodesk's Maya to create the 3D. After that, I take the frames rendered with Maya into Adobe's After Effects. Each scene is timed out, and then a Photoshop file, per scene, is created with each frame on a separate layer. Next, the frames are drawn on using a Wacom tablet and Photoshop. Finaly, the files are brought back into After Effects for the final composite.

It sounds complicated but really it's not. It is however, very tedious. Currently I have 25 seconds of animation finish in 3d. That sounds like a lot, but when you consider that it's taking me around 30 minutes to paint each frame, you can see how the tedium kicks in. I'm hoping though, that the more I practice the quicker these frames will be produced. I do enjoy it, which makes the effort rewarding.