Last month, the animation group I co-founded, AniMAtic Boston, put together a really cool mini-film festival called Overlapping Action, organized by my pal @harpoondreams​. You can see the rest of the entries by checking out @overlappingaction​ on Tumblr. Here’s mine:



I’m proud of it and excited to have a new original piece under my belt. But at the time, I had a heap of client work, and the thought of adding even a short 10 second assignment to the mix was completely overwhelming.

I knew I had to figure out how to make a cartoon VERY quickly without it coming out…well…bad. I achieved that by using an abridged pipeline, working loose without worrying too much about file structure, and using a series of “cheap” tricks to add a layer of polish at the end. Here is a rundown of my process:

1) THUMBS

Once I had my idea (the assigned topic was “Change”) I drew thumbnails as fast as humanly possible in my notebook. I made no effort to draw well, I just wanted to plan the story. That said, I think doing it this quickly helped me start to develop some of the humor of the piece.











2) ANIMATIC/ROUGH KEYS

I opened Flash, and within seconds started translating my thumbnails into an animatic. I worked loose, focusing on telling the story clearly and making it look funny. I did make sure to draw the characters how I wanted them to look in the final, so that I could re-use some of the drawings as keys later. I also kept in mind that I wanted animation to be quick, so there are lots of quick shots that advance the story without being too complicated.

3) ROUGH ANIMATION

I added a new layer for each character above the animatic layer, and just went ahead and animated, starting by tracing the existing key poses, adding a few more, and then inbetweening them. Because I kept the animatic simple, there were very few drawings to add. I did just about everything on twos.





4) CLEANUP

Because I got to this stage so quickly, I could slow down a little bit here and add some real polish. Here are the choices I made.

I used a rougher brush in Flash: I turned the smoothing down to 20. This helped highlight the notebook-doodle look as an aesthetic of the piece, not just a side effect of working fast.



I used color outlines. This takes more time than black and white outlines, but a short toon like this is a great chance to play with it. It gives everything a softer, more painterly feel that’s pleasant to look at.

I did that wiggly lines thing. This is perhaps controversial (I vaguely remember a professor at my school ranting and raving about it), and certainly a “cheap trick” but I’ve always liked it. I think it’s a great way to have characters feel dynamic, and works particularly well for really short shots. Here’s a side-by-side from the first shot, with and without the extra drawings. I think the frog on the right is more alive and fun:

As you can see from the timeline below, all I needed to do was add a couple new drawings for each hold, tracing the previous drawing.

I added drop shadows. This is another cheap trick (using a gradient fill on some ovals) to make the flat characters look like they exist in space.



Time to make every experienced Flash animator vomit:

I did all of this on the main timeline. I agree that this is a colossal no-no. But my process for this quick toon required loose, lively doodles without any overthinking. It was important that I focused on keeping that creative flow going, so I devoted almost no time or energy to file organization. Again, this would be a terrible idea for a project with more characters, more re-using of elements, or any backgrounds or camera moves. But it works just finw for a hand-drawn cartoon that’s essentially one long digital flipbook. Here’s what the timeline looked like by the end. The guide layers are the rough animation and the layers labeled “CU” are cleanup. The “bg” layer has the drop shadows.

All in all this cartoon took me only 6 hours, split up over two evenings and an afternoon. 3 hours of that time was cleanup, and almost 1 hour was making the soundtrack (a final important step in raising the production value that I can talk about in another post).

By using an abridged pipeline, working loose without worrying too much about file structure, and using a series of “cheap” tricks, I was able to make something cool without burning out.



And don’t forget to check out @overlappingaction for the other, even better entries!