For, monsterofmeg, who wanted to see my new cats. This lump is Sir Isaac Newton, the grump from the shelter who only makes vaguely annoyed noises and never meows or purrs and bit all the workers at the shelter…
As you can see he is all cleaned up now and is a fancy white grumpy lump.
Also, the new baby, who has yet to be officially named but we are torn between Aristotle and Socrates. He sees ghosts, or something, because he just freezes sometimes and stares at the walls with an alarmed look on his face for a few minutes before continuing on with life as normal. I love him.
hahaha well that’s strange seeing as that is a picture of MY kitten, Meatball, who DIED over a year ago :’( :’(
Ben Zackheim (author of the Shirley Link mysteries for kids and The Camelot Kids series for everyone) asked me a few questions about my experience working on Spooked and my plans for the future. Check it out here!
Here’s an excerpt:
You’ve been sharing your process as you create the story. What made you decide to do that?
I started this project more or less blind — I spent hours and hours doing research on workflow, the best programs to use, technical specs, and personal experience and tips. I wanted to know what actual people doing very low-budget projects with little to no crew were actually using and what they did to cut corners, make things manageable, and still look good. There are surprisingly few resources for that kind of thing online, so I figured if I chronicled my experience, I could perhaps provide that for someone else who might be looking for the same thing. It also doesn’t hurt to try to get some interest in your project before you release it so people will (hopefully) actually watch it once it’s done.
Now that you’ve done several animated projects, what’s more challenging than you thought it would be about animation?
I knew it was going to be a time-consuming process, but I didn’t quite realize how time consuming. I’ve got a full-time job, and I’ve been working on this animation after work and on the weekends — averaging about 20+ hours a week. Sometimes it can feel like I’m making no progress at all — spending 10+ hours on one single 5 second shot. I’m finally in the home stretch now and seeing it all come together is making it feel worth it, but I think next time I try to take on an animation like this, I’m going to hire someone to help me do some in-betweens or something!
Honored to be featured on their blog with other really amazing animations:
“'Spooked’ is Rachel Mersky’s first foray into creating an entirely hand-drawn animated short. This great looking teaser trailer suggests she’s onto a winner!
‘Spooked’ features a narrative steeped in traditional summer camp ghost stories and goose-bumped spookiness… Coming Soooon!”
Probably one of the most fun and most important aspects of pre-production for this project was the character design. I have many secondary characters in this animation that aren’t necessarily important to the plot, but they all had to look distinct.
I decided early on that I didn’t want any of the characters to be human in this story – mostly because I rarely draw humans and I wanted the animation process to be more fun than stressful (ha!), but also because I wanted this story to be as universal as possible.
Important considerations I kept in mind while designing the characters:
I wanted the characters to be simultaneously adorable and bizarre/weird
They had to be easy to draw, as few distinct parts as possible (I am usually very drawn to patterns and fur / scales, but I avoided those for the campers)
I wanted the characters to be able to be identified by their silhouettes alone
I probably didn’t want to have linework in the animation, so that was another consideration
Here’s some images of my process:
(This was back when the story was still written as a sister buddy film)
Which became this color study:
Monsters came last and are actually still being developed!
For each scene I animate, I first start with the background.
Then I go through and add rough line drawings for all the key positions. I do this to make sure that the motion will read and it timed at least somewhat-correctly. I create these as their own video group, using the AnimDessin plugin I mentioned in this post.
In a new video group below the lines, I begin to fill out the large blocks of color and general shapes of the character. Hide the line layer and make sure the motion still makes sense even as simple blocks of color.
Once I have the whole action blocked out in color shapes, I begin to fill them in using the AnimCouleur plugin. This creates a new video layer that is masked to the video group containing my character in color.
Using the lines as guides, I begin to fill in the shadows and other details that make up my character.
I fill in other details such as eyes, lashes, clothing details, and texture– I then group ALL of that into a smart layer I use to string together several small shots, and A SCENE IS BORN:
