Spooked

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?

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!”

annnnnd here’s the teaser!

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:

One of my biggest questions once I decided upon my story and my character designs was: Ok, now what?

I have animated before in flash, aftereffects and photoshop all in a limited quantity. I was most familiar with Photoshop as an illustration and design tool since I use it every day for my job as a designer. I was also familiar in after effects with its motion graphics tools, and I have actually used it to do character animations before -- but this was not the aesthetic I was going for. I wanted hand-drawn, frame-by-frame animation. 

Having only taken one and a half animation classes ever (neither of which were particularly helpful beyond pointing me in the direction of Richard Williams’ amazing book) I was no more equipped to make this decision than I would have been coming in blind. After spending days and days of online researching, downloading trials, doing test animations, the biggest piece of advice I can give is: just pick something and give it a go. 

Flash?

I had used flash heavily when i was younger, and created some actually quite good character animations in middle school, but I had stopped using it around the same time, and it felt clunky to me. The biggest drawback for me with flash was the lack of control I had over the illustration. The vector workspace made my images feel much more sterile and flat than I wanted. Flash did provide me with a very easy to use timeline, however, and it’s for this reason that I used Flash to create my animatic. 

Animestudio?

Frankly, I downloaded this, opened it once and forgot about it. Maybe it was the user interface that turned me off? Not sure.

TV Paint?

I had heard such great things about TV Paint, but I just didn’t have the time to learn a completely new program, nor the funds to dole out for a $600 gamble should the program be either not what i’m looking for or more complicated to learn than I was ready for. I do very much want to try this program, however. 

Photoshop.

So that takes me back to photoshop. While photoshop’s animation tools leave very much to be desired, I felt so comfortable within the working space, and since drawing was the main focus for me, it just felt right. I did some digging and found three GREAT tools that made the animation process SO MUCH EASIER and more pleasant. If anyone is interested in animating in photoshop, you MUST get these three plugins:

AnimDessin

AnimCouleur

Animator’s Toolbar

Some Flash vs. Photoshop Comparisons

Flash:

Photoshop:

Flash:

Photoshop:

Every day I seek out more inspiration for my animation. I have filled my workspace with inspiration (literally....filled.....)

I find that my classmates are a constant source of motivation and inspiration. I also  have a whole separate bookmarks folder for animation inspiration, and I frequent sites like Booooooom, Short of the Week, Ice Cream Hater, and Vimeo’s Staff Picks. 

I also found this great book on amazon for $5 (!! doesn’t look like there are any left at that price, though) and I have really enjoyed flipping through it -- awesome inspiration for animators and non-animators alike.

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)