This is it! The final animation of the DK30!

"CONTAIN"

Make sure to watch the video in outstanding quality here on Youtube and turn your sound on as well!

What a culmination! Yeah, it took a few extra days to finish it, and I did have a hard time getting the last details right, but I am very happy with the result. Obviously, it’s not perfect and there are definitely things I can improve upon (such as upping my speed so that it won’t take me a full week to animate three seconds), but I’m still pretty proud of this product!

As to the theme and cohesiveness of the animations (revolving time in quarantine and Covid-19 in general), I did take some liberties, but I tried to make them fit the brief. The guidelines really helped my creativity - it’s hard to come up with something out of nothing, and just a few restrictions can spark many good ideas.

I’ve learned so much during this DK30, and I’ve pushed myself to add a lot of structure and routine to my work flow, which is probably the main reason why I’ve been able to finish and publish all the products I initially set out to do. Sometimes a bit late, mind, which is expected and not really a problem.

I’m left with a bit of a melancholy feeling, but seeing as June is filled with paid work, it’s a good time to take a little break from animating on a schedule. I’m not getting tired of it, though, I kinda wanna keep going, and I’m sure I’ll find time to animate a little on the side if a great idea comes to mind.

Let’s take a little trip down memory lane:

Animation 1: Home Training (Acroyoga) - Sketch Only

Animation 2: What To Draw? - Drawfee Animated

Animation 3: Plant Growth (Timelapse) - Vector Art

Animation 4: NomNomNom (Excessive Eating) - Anime/Manga style

Animation 5: Waiting For All Of This To Blow Over (Please, let me have a haircut soon) - Pixel Art

Animation 6: Catch! - Character Rigging

Animation 7: KnitKnitKnit - Tim Burton/Don’t Starve style

Animation 8: CONTAIN - My own style (I think)

I’m already excited for the next DK30! What skills will I develop? Will I do another personal project or join a group? Will the DayKnight community be just as welcoming and supportive next time? (No doubt about it, we’re great people after all!) See y’all then : D

I’m soooo close to the finish line, but I do feel the need to spend another few days on the animation before I can call it quits. It just needs that extra bit of spice and a couple more frames. It will hopefully be posted on Monday! I feel bad about not meeting the deadline I set for myself, and there’s really no good excuse. I’ve just not been prioritizing the project very much since my last post. I will finish it, though, and it will be a product I can be proud of!

I’ve done such great progress, I’m actually slightly ahead of schedule. This is quite amazing to me, since I received a commissioned job on Sunday, which took all my time yesterday and this entire morning too! There are two reasons why I haven’t fallen behind on the project, 1) I’ve cut the scene a little shorter than I planned, not due to time constraints, but because the ending wasn’t really speaking to me, and 2) I’ve been working on it the entire weekend and crammed in some line art work in my “breaks” from the commissioned work the last two days. This is all good and well for the project, but it’s taking a toll on my sleep and exercise schedule, and I’m not feeling great about that. And I’m very keen on making a good product, so not animating makes me feel guilty too. Guess it’ll work out when this other job is done tomorrow.

This turned out very different from my other updates. Just typing out some feelings, I guess. I could show my progress, but I don’t want to spoil the big reveal come Friday d:

I’m so excited for the new big project I’ve decided on! I really changed it up, so instead of animating some boring bloke throwing a tennis ball in a room, I’m now going to (try to) animate a really action packed shot of this young doctor fighting/running from a (virus inspired) monster in her lab. I started yesterday with some character design and color schemes, which I’ve tweaked today and probably will tweak again later, so don’t get too attached (yes, I’m talking to myself here). My main character will look something like this, but with more clean colors and shading, since there’ll be a lot of frames, so no blending or soft shading allowed!

Bottom right is a mock up of the monster, which will be made of many smaller balls. Today I managed to animate the general idea behind the monsters attack pattern:

As always, Imgur is annoying me with it’s ‘can’t possibly do gifs that are longer than one sec’-nonsense, so here’s a link to the full cycle: img

The monster will be made out of these components, the dark one for ‘foreground’ particles and the light one for those in the back to give a 3D effect:

I also made a few quick sketches of the main character’s dodge-movement (run->slide across floor to foreground):

I hope to make a sketch of the lab background later today!

Unofficial title: Seven from Heaven

Last small animation for this project, but I really want to keep going, so we’ll see if I can’t sneak in another somewhere!

I went all-in with the painting and stylization on this one and spend maybe two hour tops on animating it, but it was exactly what I needed to get out of my art block - just do something that I know and enjoy. Since I started out as a traditional artist with acrylic paint and a quite detailed style, I wanted to explore the options for soft shading and dull colors in the digital media. Since 2D animation with a lot of details and soft shading takes a long time to animate, I chose to only make the eyes blink and the hands move ever so slightly. I really like the eyes on this one, but again, the animation was done really quickly and is nowhere near perfect. Which is fine, since it’s a two day project and my main focus was elsewhere. I found a pretty good workflow with the Photoshop layers and clipping masks, which surely will come in handy with other projects in the future.

First lineart and attempt at shading the chair.

Another version where the scarf gets longer. I couldn’t decide which was better. So I made both, obviously!

For the rest of the day I’ll try to find out what to do for the last week of the project. I want to make a more deliberate and thought out product, which is apparently hard for me. We’ll try anyway and hopefully push through!

Hey, catch!

Gosh, this rigging process sure was something.

I’m, amazingly, only one day late with this one after taking almost the entire weekend off to go on a short holiday with my nearest family. I did bring my laptop and Wacom Intuos, but it wasn’t set up right and just drawing the character in illustrator was a struggle (it always is, since I’m inexperienced in the program, but the weird settings made it even more difficult), so I decided to wait until I got home to my work computer to do the actual animating. And, oh boy, was this a frustrating process as well!

First off, I had trouble installing the Duik Bassel rigging tool set for After Effects (mostly, if not only, because I am a complete idiot). Animating was troublesome. I tried fiddling around with the tools and presets without any real knowledge of the mechanics behind it, even though I did watch a few video tutorials beforehand, but they make it look way easier than it is!). I really wanted to be able to do something like foreshortening, so the character would actually throw the disc toward the ‘camera’. I couldn’t make it work, though I’m almost sure someone with more experience could. Basically, I lack a deep enough understanding of the controls.

All in all, this experience was not enjoyable, which is why I, for the first time since the challenge started, am uploading an animation that I am simply not proud of. I did not have the patience to work on it until a satisfactory result appeared. I hope I’ll want to try again some day or just have the will to force myself into it, because I see many possibilities in character rigging that I just couldn’t explore in a day’s work.

I did not continue my large project. Right now I doubt the main idea will work out, and I’m seriously thinking about starting over. But first I’ll do the seventh little animation, which is scheduled for publishing on Wednesday. The style is undecided so I can do whatever I want, meaning I have to do a bit of research and careful thinking tomorrow. I really want to do a good job on this last one!

I call this piece: Waiting for all of this to blow over

Imgur is annoying me a bit by not including the last few frames of the animation in the gif. Hope it’s clear what’s going on anyway. It might need a bit of explaining, which also annoys me, but what can you do. I guess I could provide a link to the full animation: Imgur

Now, first of all I spent the entire day yesterday animating this (as in, at least 12 hours) as well as a few hours the day before. My wrist needs a few days to recover from the strenuous task of coloring all that hair. But the result is soooo satisfying, so it was worth it.

I knew I was doing pixel art for this two-day animation and I’ve played around with pixel art before, so I pretty much new what I was getting into. I used some lovely references from the game Celeste to draw out the shape of the main character. I wanted to focus on the animating part and skip the part of coming up with a new character. I tried to make her look like she’s squinting against the wind or out of nuisance.

I made the hair grow rapidly, which is supposed to symbolize the ‘can’t go to the hairdresser during quarantine’ scenario. I’m not sure it successfully delivers that message. But it was hella fun to do, so I don’t care that it looks like her hair is being ripped out of her scalp by the wind! Using a video game character also portrays very well what’s on my mind these days. I’m not much of a gamer, but Metroidvania is one of the few genres I really enjoy both playing and watching others play.

A bit of process for y’all: I started by re-watching some Youtube videos explaining the wave principle and how to animate hair in general. Then I concocted this little line animation in Photoshop resembling how most organic things move from side to side.

I put this in on top of the character’s head and shaped the hair using the line as reference. When I was satisfied with the first ten frames, I copied them and elongated the hair on the second round (frames 11-20) and did the same with the last round (frames 21-30). Then came all the shading (dramatic pause). This was both really rough and super satisfying. Even though the process is repetitive, I did have to pick highlights and shadows rather carefully, going back and forth between frames to get the motion right and establish strands of hair, that’s invisible in the flat coat of orange. So a bit of flair and creativity was needed.

Here’s how the hair looks before and after shading.

Finally, here’s the animation without hair growth - this is probably going in my portfolio :D

I can’t believe I’m actually on schedule with these small animations. I’m pretty proud of myself : D This is my worst habit during the Covid-19; baking and eating way too much cake! Just thought I’d show some of the bad stuff and not pretend everything is peachy.

Drawn in a simplistic anime style with just seven frames, this little gif calls for a loop for anyone to even understand what’s going on. This took a long time for me even though I basically only drew one picture and manipulated the lines instead of drawing new ones for every frame. Same with the coloring and shading. It’s definitely an unfamiliar style for me and I relied heavily on references to get a look resembling anime. I still ended up with chunky lines, which is camouflaged a bit with the colored lineart, but it’s still pretty obvious to me that they are too thick. Still, I’m very happy that I made this little piece, even though I’m pretty sure this is not gonna be my style in the future ^^

Next style is pixel art, and I did a quite wild pixel art animation on commission a few months back which I might publish when I have the DK30 one finished in three days (hopefully).

I tried animating on the large project a few days back, but I’m not happy with the result. Thinking back, I might have just plowed through without thinking about the style I was going for, so I’ll try again tomorrow and do a better job at finding style references and plan things out a bit better.

How important is colored lineart? You tell me:

Colored lines:

Black lines:

So I decided to change the plan and make a vector style key-framed animation instead of the scheduled frame-to-frame anime-style. Simply didn’t have the time to color individual frames this round due to overtime at work. I also didn’t get to continue the big project on Wednesday - same excuse. But I have a full day tomorrow to catch up!

I recently planted some wild flower seeds in my garden and they started to sprout a few weeks back which made me want to make a timelapse animation of the growth. It goes well with the theme of ‘what I do during Covid-19’ - I’ve had so much time to just do stuff around the house and in the garden! I love it! It’s supposed to be a poppy btw which is one of my favorite flowers. I think it resembles alright for a style of simplicity. Also I didn’t spend too many hours - this is a style I’ve practices a lot before and even though it’s not as enjoyable using the pen-tool as using the brush tool, I think the results are lovely and I especially like the smoothness you can get.

The final path/shape of the flower is made in Illustrator and then animated in after effects. I find it much easier to work backwards and have the final flower (which is more complex that the first sprout) and then chip away at it instead of expanding.

I’ve been pretty stressed out the past week, but when I see the results I feel like it’s worth it. Both on the animation and the work front. I’m learning so much, and I enjoy that so much, that not being able to do much else than work and animate is not so bad.

I hope I can do the anime-style next, but we’ll see!

Good news! I finished my second short animation and I’m proud to say I did not spend too long on this! It is super simple and short as I want these projects to be (since everyday work is piling up as well, I don’t have all that many hours a day to animate). Here it is:

I “borrowed” the style from Drawfee Animated, here’s my reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJnS6i2ULfI

I think it turned out just fine. I’m glad I challenged myself on the angle, since the animating part was pretty straight forward.

Bad news: I’ve done all the simply styles now, so next up in the schedule is Anime, which is much more demanding, since it involves coloring every frame AND shading. That means I really have to limit the amounts of frames. It’ll be a proper eight frames GIF I suppose ^^

I also have an update on my larger project. I’ve not done a whole lot yet, I’ve sketched out the layout and animated the flow of the moving parts.

Tomorrow is designated large project-day, but I have to do a ton of work, so I’ll probably not get much farther. I’m gonna tell myself that is fine, I have a week in the end to push through with this big one, and if I don’t make it, I’m sure I can extend the project a few days to come up with a finished product!

Okay, this will be a looooong update. Don’t worry though, I’ll make sure to put the fun stuff first! #notatease

First up, the youtube link to my first short animation: https://youtu.be/5jTWbdCFoPk

I did this in the first two days of the challenge. I started with blocking out the general idea and finding a decent flow and timing for the movements. There are flaws, especially near the end where I sort of ran out of time. I might go back and work on it a bit more later on, but it’ll do for now.

“What am I even looking at?” You’re asking. Well, this idea has been stuck in my head ever since the country (Denmark, that is) shut down every group activity including sport. I’ve been doing Acroyoga for a year, and it is super addictive (in a good way), so when the gym closed down, my partner suggested I teach him a few poses so that I could practice at home. This is one of the first flows we did together and it brings me so much joy - I simply had to animate it!

Here’s a work in progress pic:

Today I’m sketching out the main idea for my larger project. I have a good gist of what it’s going to be, and I’m super happy my sketching hand is properly warmed up!

Last thing in this update - A week back I made this list of technical and creative guidelines. They are subject to change.

Overall theme:

• Everyday life during Covid-19

Technicalities:

• Format: Square with rounded corners or standard 16:9
• Frame rate: 12 fps
• Programs: Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Animate
• Length:
  • Small animations: 8-20 frames
  • Big animation: approx. 84 frames (12x7)
• Export: Quicktime animation with alpha, GIF or H.264
• Release platforms: Youtube and instagram, @schioeler_productions

Big animation idea:

• Guy throws a tennis ball against floor, bounce on wall, catch (loop) + some animation in the background or maybe a camera movement (differ from style to style)
• The style of the animation changes for every loop (the seven styles of the small animations – take what I’ve learned and apply it to the big project.

Small animation ideas:

• Plant grows, time lapse
• Acroyoga flow
• Reading books in the garden
• Cinnamon buns rising in the oven

Styles:

• Sketchy pencil drawing, frame-by-frame
• ‘Drawfee animated’, frame-by-frame
• Vector art, key frames
• Pixel art, frame-by-frame
• Anime action, frame-by-frame
• Vector art, character rigging, key frames
• Artist’s choice (revisit one of the former or find a seventh)