Pop The Top: A New Cartoon I'm Working On

A skipping cycle for a new cartoon I'm working on

     So I've been doing these animation studies for the past few months, and I kept getting told during critiques that I needed to do work that was more than just studies. I kept having to tell them that the whole point of the studies was to get my basic skills up to where I think they should be, and the studies were all going towards a bigger project at the end of the year.
     And now here I am in the final semester at college. So far I've done 9 tests, and while I wish I had done more, it's time for me to work on that bigger project I was talking about. In keeping with figuring out everything that was wrong with The Pancakes Cartoon, I want this cartoon to be almost strictly visual and I want every movement to be entertaining in and of itself.

     The premise of the cartoon will be Tommy trying to open an old-style glass soda bottle. Of course he's too young to know what a bottle opener is, and that's the gist of the story. I want to make more personal cartoons in the future, but for now, I just wanted a simple premise to be able to tell a story visually.

     It was so simple, in fact, that I already made it 5 years ago. That version is right below. The reason I kept it silent was because the cartoon I made before it had bad lip-syncing, so I thought I'd ignore it for the time being. It was hand drawn like my other animated cartoons, but for my earlier cartoons, I'd cut each paper into 4 pieces since I was only used to working on a small scale. The cartoon was put together on an older version of Windows Movie Maker. The highest frame rate was 7 and 1/2 frames per second For whatever reason, it cut some sequences in near the end, so the last 10 seconds or so look choppily edited.

     Now the cartoon I'm making now won't be an exact remake of the cartoon above. I just wanted to use the same premise, since it will be easy to work with. I might reuse some of the jokes, but for the most part, I want to keep it fresh.

     One thing I'm doing this time around is I'm going right in to animating. That's right, no storyboard, no notes, no nothing. The story for The Pancakes Cartoon was pretty much carved in stone, since it was never deviated from once it was animated. This time I want to keep it open ended and see how much I can put into the cartoon before I have to turn it in for my Senior Thesis class.

     And what better place to start than the beginning. Now I won't post all of the pencil tests I do, or even most of them, but I thought I'd go ahead and talk about this one. For this test I wanted to make a more exaggerated skip, so I combined the walking cycles with the bouncing ball cycle. Overall, I think it came out very nicely, although I still have a few nitpicks.

     For starters, I fell back on my old habit of drawing things small; I wish I drew it larger, but that shouldn't be a problem in the final version since I'll be editing everything in photoshop. Really, the only other thing I can think of right now is that there's a little bit of inconsistency. Some of the drawings have have Tommy wearing shorts and some of them don't have that line, so it looks like he's wearing pants. Again, an easy fix, and it's only really noticeable when you still frame the clip. Also, I haven't figured out how to give Tommy a lower jaw; his head's only a sphere. His hair is similar to Mickey Mouse's ears in that, they only exist on a 2-D plane, so basically they're cheated. I used some overlapping action on them that really strengthened the piece.

     Again, I'm not going to post most of the clips, but the whole cartoon should be done around the middle of April. I really want to get camera movements in this one, especially with this sequence. Anyway, here are the drawings.