Ghosty Animation Process and Timelapse

Ghosty Process Timelapse from Draconian Rain on Vimeo.

It's no secret that I love everything bright and flashy in my art and I have a terrible habit of making my paintings and animations too busy. Which you will see happening in the timelapse video above.

My goal was simple enough: Animate a simple ghost in no more than 15 frames at 12fps on loop.

For whatever reason I couldn't get Ping Ping loop to work and a few times I tried copy, paste reversed and that was ok, but in the end I used motion path and made sure the movement was fluid enough to not need ping pong looping.

I had planned out to keep everything super simple. A basic background or blank background, a simple cartoon ghost. But I couldn't help myself, I had to make the inner body look magical and like it had spiritual energy. Then I had an idea. A while ago now, I watched a TVPaint video where someone created animated brush strokes by holding CTRL while drawing on a series of empty instances. And no matter how often the person drew, it continually made a perfectly looped animation.

I then created a simple mask and did exactly that for the coloured balls inside the ghost. I then created another mask and experimented with various layer blend modes for highlighting and shading the outter and inner parts of the ghost to make the balls of energy look a little more interesting. It was also the easiest way I could think of to make them look like they were glowing without drawing some effects over the top of each orb.

I then used the old mask, coloured it orange, blurred it and set it to a bright blending mode, I think screen and used it as back lighting to the ghost. During the timelapse you can see where I get distracted by other ideas and ideas for what kind of background I might like.

At one point I used the same method of drawing the orbs as a way to create flames. I felt as though the little ghost looked a little distressed but his colours where too cheerful and I scrapped the idea of him floating about a fire. I also had an idea to add clouds and a starry night, but there was so much going on inside the ghost that everything else seemed too distracting and I ultimately settled for something simple.

So basically, though I planned out what I was going to do, I got distracted. I'm glad I did because I enjoyed exploring other options available to me in TVPaint for creating an interesting animation.

Basically, if you don't take my distraction into account what I did was simply this:

• Made a draft animation and used motion path to make the ghost bob. Kept it simple
• Inked said animation.
• Coloured on separate layer to use as mask
• Duplicated the mask because I liked the blue colour and wanted it kept neat.
• Created a sort of motion pen effect similar to Adobe After Effects and used the mask to keep everything constricted inside the ghost's body.
• Highlighted ghost features and made it glow with Anim Layer blend modes. I used the mask to keep it all neat.
• Tried to create a low distraction background to keep focus on the ghost.
• I merged the ghost into a single layer except for the background light and set both to the same motion. I wanted to keep the glow bright. So the ghost ink, colour and top layer effects were all merged while the glow behind stayed separated.
• Used beizure curves on the motion path to further smooth out the motion and overall movement of the ghost and ghost light.
• Experimented like crazy!

And that's pretty much what I do with every thing I work on whether it's painting or animating. I don't work for a company and I am self taught so I tend to experiment an awful lot. After a while though I was able to get some great video tutorials and though I've learned all I can about animation I am still in the phase of practising and experimenting and now I'm at a point where people are asking me how I came up with my ideas or how to animate.

To put it simply, I experiment every chance I get. I do it because fun things like this happen. But you should still have a clear plan for your idea and how you want to go about creating it. It helps to plot out even the most basic animation and this is one of those things I have learned the hard way. You should also go to Aaron Blaise's website and invest in buying his tutorials. It will help you out so much in your animation journey!

Next post, I will try much harder to create a less confusing video. My current audience is growing and there's more demand to have both timelapse and realtime. But my PC is not very powerful so creating realtime videos can be quite difficult. I promise to try though.