Aside from the just plain awesomeness and relevance of the festival I am telling you this for a reason. I managed to get some work out of the workshops as well. I was the youngest and least experienced person there and therefor I admittedly had no idea which jobs sucked, which ones you don't want to be stuck doing and which ones nobody ever wants to do. Which made me the perfect person to do some colouring in for one of the colleges graduates. And to be quite honest I didn't find colouring boring at all. My shoulder did get kind of sore but that's ok.
She was working on a short clip to be played in a cinema before each screening, a sort of cinema indent or sting I think. However she had another project coming up and still some work to be done on this one. Which is where I come in. I did the colouring in and in return she taught me how to use photoshop.
Which then lead me to make this, horrifyingly mistake ridden, wobble, ill-researched walk cycle of a fox. I was actually trying the colouring technique out and not at all the actual animation. As I know foxes don't walk like that. It just got worse when I tired to make it into a gif, he moves far to fast. Yet I know if I don't try these things out I will never learn to use them, right? Exactly. So the technique I was actually trying to use in my own work is the one I was taught. It involves taking the object you wish to colour and filling it with a pattern that will sit behind the object. Which is really cool because it stays in the same place as the character moves across it.
For example the telly show "chowder" used this technique and I used to ponder how they had done it. Here's a picture.
I have yet to completely try this technique out because I haven't had photoshop for very long and it's being problematic so I have some bugs to work out before I can really get animating but I have given it a good shot...
Remember what I said about pretty much everything being wrong though...
