Getting Back to the Basics

     Back in February, I finished working on a year long project with one of my good friends. We're both aspiring to be great animators. The entire thing was hand drawn and took over 1700 drawings. Each drawing was scanned in and inked on photoshop. We put alot of work into it and in all that time this is what we came up with:

 

      And looking back on it, it's pretty terrible. The audio was horribly balanced and the images were at a God-awful low resolution. These were the things that people seemed to focus on during my critiques at school (mostly the audio). A lot of people asked me if I would go back and fix the problems with the video and I said no because at the time I was sick of working on it. But now, even if I had fixed the audio, saved higher quality images and used better animation software, there's still one problem that remains: the animation itself. (The story was kinda haphazard too, but I've made better stories.)

      

      Just about all the drawings were sloppy, and the animation was an afterthought. The only idea behind the animation was connect this crappy drawing to that crappy drawing. There really was no reason for this to be animated. Nothing in the story warrented movement. I could have made this a comic and been done with it in a week or two. I could go on about everything wrong with The Pancakes Cartoon, but I'll save that for another day.

      So several months past, and the whole time I've been working in my sketchbook, studying the classic Preston Blair book and trying to learn the classic drawings principles, like solid forms, positive and negative space, line of action, and other stuff that makes old cartoon look so fantastic. It's been a few months, and I'm only just starting to understand these concepts.

 One thing I've learned is to be my own worst critic, since most people seem to be content with poorly constructed drawings, since that's what's all over TV and and pop culture nowadays. Even at school, most of my art professors seemed to be ok with my subpar comic drawings since cartoons are supposed to look like shit anyway, right?

    Now of course, when I'm referring to being my own worst critic, I'm of course talking about constructive criticism (which art schools seem to be in short supply). One of the reasons I worked with Justin on the Pancakes Cartoon was because he has his fundamentals down (which you don't see enough of, because he had to work off my crappy drawings). 

    But anyway, several months go by, I've been working on the Preston Blair studies on and off and I soon find myself three weeks into my Senior Thesis class and I still haven't started my project. Now my original intention was to go ahead and make a second cartoon using those same characters. And I was really close to starting too. I wrote and drew the story, I recorded the voices, and I spent most of my summer working on final cut to make all the audio clear and uniform. So I had all of this work done and I finally sat down to do the character models and I realized something. I was about to make the same mistakes I made with the Pancakes Cartoon all over again. I was going too far ahead, and I was going to continue to glaze over those fundamentals. So I decided then and there to stop what I was doing and work on some animation studies so that I could one day make cartoons that I was actually proud of.

     I'll start talking about my animation tests and critiquing them in my next post.