A Look Back On The Pop The Top Cartoon: Part 3

The timing was off in this, but the line work was better.

 The Inking

     After the Pancakes Cartoon, I knew I had to get the line work down. And given all the hours I'd spent using my tablet working on Photoshop, I thought I had it down . . . Well, turns out I didn't quite get it yet. When I started inking the first few sequences, the final drawings seemed sanded down and kinda clunky. Even though the original drawings were far from perfect, they looked better than their Photoshopped counterparts.

The neck's pretty bad in the final version.

     As I went on, I think the inked drawings got closer to the original drawings. The hardest part for me was to get the line widths down. When using a pencil and paper, it's not too hard since you're seeing and feeling exactly how the pencil is touching the paper. But using a tablet leads to a bit of a disconnect. So I'm having to sort of retrain myself. While I think the inking worked out as it went along, there's something to be said for the natural warmth that comes with a hand drawn image.

     Still, I know I'll have to get used to inking my images digitally, since that's the only way I can get the animation drawings to go on the separate layers in Photoshop. At least if I want to have backgrounds and want it to look more like a traditional cartoon. Now that's not to say I couldn't do just the drawings, like my animation tests. And I might do that for a few short projects in the future.

Working at the Kentucky School of Art

The Process

     Now I already went into this in the first post, but I'll go into it a little more here. Unlike my other comics and animated shorts, I didn't start out with a rough draft. This wasn't as hard since I told the story once before. I did this so that I could be free to explore where I wanted to go with it, unlike The Pancakes Cartoon.
     I had thought about the first three sequences over and over for months before I even put them on paper.  It took three weeks to draw the first three sequences.It was then that I got in the groove of things and I knocked out the next nine sequences in the next three weeks just in time for the session break in early March.

 (I know I have a photo of me working in my studio. I'll update this post if I can find it.)

     When the next trimester started I really busted my ass trying to meet my deadline of April 17th. So I spent two weeks inking on Photoshop for 5 or 6 hours every night, making sure I got an entire sequence done every day. I spent the next two weeks editing the drawings together with the sound, making sure the timing was right, only this time the school didn't have Final Cut. Of course, the one time I really needed it, the Macs crapped out and couldn't run Final Cut due to some bullshit updating issues, so I had to use After Effects. This was much less intuitive, since the timeline was less of a timeline and more of a time-staircase. Since it was less intuitive, I couldn't even do the original ending I had in mind where Tommy would swear at the audience, since I couldn't figure out how to time the voices.

     But as unintuitive as After Effects was for frame-by-frame animation, I was able to edit the video together in time, but just barely. In face the last day it was due, I probably worked over 24 hours, though the night, through two or three Full Throttles, I got the video finished about 20 minutes before the critique. And I messed up something during the exporting, so I didn't even get a proper critique for my final. Yeah, doesn't that figure. I got it figured out in a day or two, and I was able to show it off then. Hell, I'll take it. Usually I'll miss my self-imposed deadlines for my projects, so this was the first time I basically got something done when I said it'd get done.

The Critiques

     Sine this was a part of my Senior Thesis class, I would periodically get a critique by a faculty mentor, a visiting artist, or one of my professors. I got a lot of advice tackling the cartoon from different angles, mostly from the drawings and the backgrounds. In fact, it was my mentor who suggested that I add more space not only in the backgrounds but in the animation. That's where I got the idea to add the sandbags in the shot after the explosion and to have Tommy come towards the screen after he lights the dynamite.

I originally was only going to have the crater, but the sandbags show better space, and it just looks nice.

      I'll say this about my critiques and my critiquers. They gave me some good advice and they were damn good artists. But they definitely weren't animators. Now to be fair, it's not like any of my teachers said they were; they were mostly painters and illustrators. And KSA is still a small school, so it'll probably be a long time before they have any regular animation teachers. So while I was at somewhat of a disadvantage of not having anyone on campus really know anything specifically about animation, maybe this was for the best. I had to learn everything I know about my animation by myself, and I guess that taught me how to be more self-taught. And I didn't have to conform to some teachers' idea of what animation is supposed to be. (Not that any of the teachers at KSA are like that, but most animation schools are.) And the Senior Thesis class was open ended enough that I could work on a project like this and be generally supported. I would like to go back there some day and see if there are any other aspiring animators at that school; I already found a few.

     Okay, this is taking longer than I expected, so I'll wrap this up in one final post tomorrow. I want to go over the general reaction, why this cartoon will always be better than The Pancakes Cartoon, what I've been doing since then, and what I hope to do next.