Responsive Collab - Creating the drawings ready for animating

Having decided on the contents of each frame of each of the 3 animations in the previous meeting, we had gone away and each drawn 2/3 frames of the American Diner-set story, about Overcoming the Monster. Doing it this way means that all 4 of our different drawing styles can be brought together, rather than designating a whole animation to each of the three animators.That is, apart from any individual character design -as you need to them to look the same from scene to scene, so whoever designs the characters draws them for every part of the animation that they feature in.So in short, i designed the chubby diner guy, so ill do all the drawings of him, doing his 'thing'. I'm not exactly sure how well the variations in style will all come together, or if it'l work as a cohesive spectacle, but thats part of the fun of trying it out. I say fun, i mean challenge. 

Finished scene, ready for Joe to weave his magic.The picture frames have been 

left blank for people's drawings of the 'Wall of Famers' to be added inside them.

Did a quick timeline animation in Photoshop just to see how the legs would look waggling. I've mentioned it in the past in various blog posts, but this is very much inspired by my nostalgic love for the 'point-&-click' PC adventure games of th early 90's.(Sam&Max, Day of the Tentacle)

To give Joe as much flexibility and opportunity to make things move about independently of each other, once scanned into photoshop, i separated anything that i thought may need to move,wiggle or float into their own layers (eye lids, mouths,limbs), then added colour to it all. Far more time consuming than simply scanning and colouring in your hand drawn artwork, but if the end results can be improved by doing it then I'm all for it. Must keep in mind that each scene is only going to be seen for 2 seconds so shouldn't be so pedantic - but then i also tell myself "look at the 1940's Disney animator guys" they didn't have that attitude, needs to look good no matter how briefly you actually see your handywork!

Initial rendered drawing

Same drawing but  with the addition of moveable facial features

Further development character drawings and finals below

After making that super-quick 'waggly legs' animation i really wanted to do more, i've even thought that once this is all done with i'd like to go back and draw the whole animation myself, as a longer version -well, longer than 20 seconds anyway, if only to give my After Effects skills a brush-up.