Animation time :)

Hi I'm Glivs! I'm a 2D animator, here's my current reel ^^ All personal works, still waiting on some permission to share professional work :p

Hiya, thanks so much for the kind ask :) Sorry for the long answer :'D

I'll be honest, process is still something I'm actively figuring out too ^^' After working as a cleanup artist, I had a problem for a while of trying to go directly from blank canvas straight to tiedowns. Which can work fine for simple or limited movements, like the last one here! but for anything else, my brain is not yet big enough to process much info at once and it usually results in lackluster movements/bad construction haha.

So recently I've been doing scribbly first passes to visualize movement, and feeling out exactly how much i need to draw there to make myself comfortable tying things down on a second pass. (I think that level of comfort varies from person to person, since everyone's got slightly different processes and levels of visualization skill. some people dont need this scribble pass at all)

i do generally just hit some key poses for these, and then throw in a few inbetweens to help me feel out the flow of timings better. and I'll skip drawing body parts on those inbetweens if they're not super important to the movement. here, as an example, the first pass for this animation looked like this:

Bald. Not something im super proud of sharing lmao, and i need to work on my draftsmanship. but. hey, helped me feel out the movement.

i felt like from this point i had to figure out the body + hat since it's kind of all over the place, and those shoulder plates would play a big role in determining how the hair falls around it. so i focused tying those drawings down:

i think this is the hardest and most time consuming part, just constantly comparing frames and making sure everything's on model. I still have to keep reminding myself to not autopilot cleaning my scribbly roughs, but to actually think about volume/consistency and correct accordingly.

Definitely spend time making your keys accurate first here and then do inbetweens, to save yourself headaches of finding mistakes later and having to fix it 10 times instead of just once. Helps to not only flip/onion skin between adjacent frames too, like instead of just making sure frames 1 and 2 still look like the same guy, also to check that frames 1 and 60 do too to avoid slowly drifting off model over time, if that makes sense. temporarily move frame 1 next to frame 60, just for referencing if you need! I do that a lot lol. Then since the hair is an overlapping movement, i straight-ahead-ed a rough to feel it out (minus some inbetweens) and then tied it down:

almost feels like fx animation since loose hair changes shape so much, fun cus you can be less strict without it standing out too much haha.

I admittedly rushed shading and fills to hit the deadline...but it's the same process there basically lol. keys, then inbetweens.

I really wanted to wait until it released before I announced I was lucky to have worked on it. because look. I understand how annoying it is to be like "I worked on something for years but it's a secret so you cant see it!" But now it feels like I can't announce it in good taste anymore.

I can't control what anyone does, i just ask anyone reading this to please understand that speaking for myself, this isn't how I wanted it to go down at all. We are still not allowed to share what we did on the movie, or how much control we did or did not have over any specific creative decisions. You won't be able to point out a single shot and name the animator(s) that did it. because in this situation it's been made impossible to know. It's just further separating artists from their work, excluding us from the conversation.

some people ask how they can help the artists, i dunno. maybe if you watched it, give some assurance that you will watch it again one way or another come release/when we can actually share what we did.

bugs when you lift up a coral