I love animating, though I will admit that I still have a lot to learn. That being said, I can’t just sit around and wait for my skills to reach peak level – I kinda have to through myself out there and just work on things. The bees are one of those things.
First, I start with a list of all the animations, then I go in and add in details about said animations, literally writing out what this character or thing should be doing in detail. This gives me a good overview of what needs to be done and makes the task less daunting (I need to keep my anxiety in check).
Then I go ahead and chose a ‘victim’ for animating that day.
Just kidding, they should be honored I picked them.
I draw out my victi-ahem-honored character in Procreate on my iPad. Thanks to the notes I made about what movements need to happen, I make sure to draw everything separated into appropriate layers. Basically, you want to make the actual animation job as simple as possible, and having a neat file with everything broken into pieces (think of a marionette that has the pieces all strung together) does just that. Since I’m animating for a game, there’s even more segmentation involved. In a lot of ways, I feel like animating for a video is a lot more straightforward, while for a video game you have to be smart about it. Certain parts need to be interchangeable depending on what the player does in the game.
From here I create the keyframes and then go ahead and do the in-betweens. There’s always some kind of tweaking involved, plus, I play the frames over and over to see how it’s progressing and looking. Animation for me is a lot of finessing and going right to the limit of where I’m about to lose my marbles.
But that’s also what makes it kind of satisfying, I think. You work hard, think “this is crap”, you work harder, and then it somehow comes together. It ends up giving me a lot of satisfaction. Plus, it’s magical to see my once static illustrations come to life!
Please enjoy this newsletter envelope that brings me a lot of joy (though it’s by no means a fancy animation) and subscribe to our newsletter!
