mel’s dangerous ball bearings

So let's start with what our goal with this scene was. We wanted to get this sequence from Homestuck into an animated format: x x x x x

We had this animated before for our OPV1, but as we are re-making this OP, this needed to be re-made as well:

(the character models also changed, so this would have needed heavy editing even if we did want to reuse it) So, here was our new storyboard:

Here are the keys made from those boards:

While it isn't ALWAYS done, it is common for keys to be done before roughs are tackled, in a process typically called "layout animation". The main goal in this process is to make sure all the blocking beats are hit, and that the character will remain on-model for the scene. You might not be able to tell, but these keys do end up in the rough!

When Mel was working with this scene, she came up with a few points we missed. Like the Kind Of Important Detail that Rose stabs the ogre in the eyes, and then does a badass flip to get to the top of his head, neither of which were in our storyboard. So like the pro she is, she got permission, and then added it into the sequence.

Here's what the roughs ended up looking like:

See if you can spot the keys! (Mel did such a good job they're practically invisible!)

It's clear here Mel was the perfect choice for this scene! If you're familiar with their work, you know one of their strengths is elasticity. Look at these frames and tell me you're seeing what I'm seeing:

Then lines got added:

Here's what Mel has to say about working on this scene:

ANIMATOR Prosciuttoon/Mel (twt/tumblr): I did almost everything for this scene, which isn't usually the protocol. You usually do one thing, like roughs, then pass it onto someone else to do cleanup, etc. In this case, Zero did the thumbs/boards, then I did the keys all the way to colours! We're a small team (iirc there is only 1 person who specifically does cleanup), so sometimes you have to make do. Since the scene was already pretty complicated (with the string physics and water n all) I did it so no one else would have to... Plus I did the rough so I already understood what was going on.

ANIMATOR Prosciuttoon/Mel (twt/tumblr): Fun fact: originally there wasn't a background when Rose is jumping on the ogre, that's something I added myself, w permission ofc. The worst part of working on this was actually exporting all the frames to put in the project drive, which had to be separated by foreground, background, lines and colours. 🚬

There are quite a few things I didn't include in this post about the BTS of this shot, but this post is already massive, so I'm going to call it here. See you next month, tumblr! this post is brought to you by timeKeeper [TK], your local neighborhood clock stealer