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I'm used to animate stuff in After Effects, but now I try to do hand-drawn animation. I'm fairly new to this whole field and would be really glad to get some tips and critique.


This is the trailer for a new motion and interactive conference in Frankfurt. I did all the drawings in TVPaint. But I only got ten days, so I wasn't able to animate everything by hand, as I would like to. Therefore you can see a lot of After Effects trickery. Really hand animated are only the arm in the first shot, the stuff on the cube in the second one, the robot and the scientist in the third and the tear running down the cheek of the robot.

Interesting stuff

Nice job!

There's a nice, world of science atmosphere to the piece, without the tired, whoosh bang noisy junk of so much science fiction crap one sees everywhere. The balance of the little man so nicely animated as he rushes in and out in the back and the almost complete lack of colors contributes to making the whole thing come together the most. But if this is what you like making more than anything (which your avatar already suggests) you will have to rethink your approach to hand drawn TVPaint animation from the core.

Any recommended tricks? Find something that gives you pure pleasure to draw and that something is what you would have least expected as being fun. If you feel what you are trying to accomplish takes too much time and doesn't seem worth the effort, then it isn't. Somehow what you have done here makes me think you like to work in large formats. If this is so, just for fun try drawing very small people being busy inside a large format. Your tendency to make fine lines fit between even finer lines will be vastly curbed that way, and particularly if you select a somewhat chunky line. At least this is an experiment I'd be curious to watch someone of your nature come up with.

Thank you Elodie and mox!

And especially thank you Paul. I'm glad you wrote something. I really like your posts in the forum.
thank you for the compliment, but I don't understand the meaning of this sentence

But if this is what you like making more than anything (which your avatar already suggests) you will have to rethink your approach to hand drawn TVPaint animation from the core.

If I would like to draw little mans or avoide using colours?

And thank you a lot for the idea of filling some large format with small people. I guess this is a great idea to try. Especially if you like me and always try to add more detail. That's really something I envy you for, your loose and natural drawing style.

Yes, an awkwardly written sentence; I meant to say by that, that if you are the type of artist who likes to draw clean lines constructed with much precision and on top of that you have a need to maintain that precision while creating motion, TVPaint does not particularly specialize in delivering such results. I consider TVP the best application in existence for assisting artist/animators with the means to bring into motion loosely rendered lines that give away a lot of the artist's personal emotions (BTW, when trying to express this I wasn't thinking of the use of color in any way).

I for one, don't believe anymore in the importance of maintaining a personal style (I used to give this factor too much importance for too many years). On the contrary, I believe that it is helpful for the sake of telling a story in the most economical way to switch styles to fit the story telling in process of the moment.

So all I was suggesting to you was to find out for yourself if you would feel just at home with drawing loose, or even sloppy lines, as you do with the precision ones, which you are quite good at. I wrote this directly in answer to your request:

I'm used to animate stuff in After Effects, but now I try to do hand-drawn animation. I'm fairly new to this whole field and would be really glad to get some tips and critique.