Transcript
Hello, I’m Darren Garrett and I’m the chief creative at Littleloud Animation.
I got into animation because I was really interested in the way you can tell stories, bring your own drawings to life - create worlds basically.
Our current project at the moment is for Blast.
Animation Demos
You have to come up with the character to begin with. You think about their personality, how they look, what makes them distinctive as a character. Someone that can really stand out.
An animation starts with a script. After writing the script, we take it into a story board stage: you tell the story in pictures, frame by frame, like in a comic book. You work out what you’re doing from stage to stage, from picture to picture, from scene to scene.
After the storyboarding process which is all done in pencil, we scan the drawings into the computer. We then take these scanned-in drawings and trace over the top using the tools in the computer to make the final artwork for the animation.
We look at what’s needed for each episode, what’s happening to the characters and where the episode is set. Say you’ve got laughing mouths, cross mouths, angry mouths, pointing fingers, waving hands – all these different things are assets. Say you’ve got a character that needs to laugh – they might start with a straight face and end up on a laughing face, but to get from that point to the laughing point, you need to draw all the drawings in between. They are your assets that make up that sequence.
Once the drawings have gone inside the computer, we take it to the next stage, where we take a character and we rig it, which is basically like a puppet - we give the drawing bones. We then have bones inside and arm which enable it to move much like a real figure.
Once all the animation is finished, it goes to the editor and he is responsible for compositing. This involves pulling all the animations together with the background, which can involve buildings or sky or foregrounds or 3d elements, and making it all work together. Also at this stage, we add in sound effects, voice over and any other music that might need to go in the sequence. And then that makes up the final animation.
Animation tips
To get started, make your own character.
When you are designing the character, think about the body shape. And think about what they’re wearing because it helps to define their character.
The next step is to think about your character and all the different faces and expressions they can pull. Like here, we’ve got 'confused,' we’ve got 'happy'... we’ve got 'grumpy'.
Act out your characters' movements. This will really help you to understand how to animate them.
Oh, another thing – good luck!