Responsive Collab - Draw/Colour/Animate/Repeat

The first of the three animations was coming together, and we started making the handrawn elements for the other two. The general production process we'd adapted was now the following;

• Delegation of 2/3 story scenes to each team member.

• Hand drawn characters & backgrounds drawn then scanned in a sent to the Facebook group. Myself or Joe would then render them in Photoshop and make various parts 'animatable' (limbs, surrounding objects).

• Joe, and on occasions myself, would animate the scenes using After Effects.

• Joe would bring all the finished, animated artwork together as one continuos story. He'd send it back to me where i apply the sound effects and music and any other little tweaks or additions to the animation. 

• Once i'd run it past the rest of the group, it would be be finalised and exported as a Quicktime file. Then on to the next one.


This system seemed to be an effective one, as each one of us has different levels of skill and software knowledge, so it made sense to give the relative tasks to the team members with the relevant know-how.With the deadline relatively near it wouldn't have been productive to give the photoshop/illustrator rendering to someone who wasn't comfortable using photoshop/illustrator.Same goes with the animation side of things.

My own personal process in the making of the selected scenes for the Asian-themed story are shown below.

Generally it goes; 
CHOOSE SCENES> 
MAKE SKETCHES> REFINE SKETCHES>
MAKE FINAL LINE WORK VERSIONS> 
SCAN> COLOUR> SEPARATE INDIVIDUAL ELEMENTS> 
ANIMATE IN AFTER EFFECTS > 
SOURCE SOUND FX > EDIT & APPLY SOUND FX> 
SEND TO JOE.

Wok scene.Photoshop layers ready for animation in After Effects.

Banquet layers - most of which may ultimately not be required to move,

but i like to provide the option.(yes,even the chillies on the rice!)

To lighten the animation work load at Joe's end i animate my own scenes where possible before sending it to him. With each scene we were making only being about 2 secs long, it only had to be basic,quick animations and that's something i had enough After Effects experience to be able to handle. I wasn't making Akira or anything! It was also a good refresher course for me in A.E.(finished wok scene below)