September Snapshot #1

I hope your closing weeks of summer have been fruitful!

I wanted to cover several different things with this snapshot posting since I've noticed a few trends and have plans to make changes (as I normally do). Most of it will cover how I post material, how animations will be produced and what my prospects in project work will start to look like in the next few months.

Presentation Changes:

So given my current workflow I plan on continuing my long-term projects with bi-weekly snapshots like this one moving forward but to avoid too much posting spam, like the update from last week, I've opted to merge the weekend animation marathon projects into these posts to consolidate the information and allow for more content to be seen at once without pestering your inboxes about yet again another posting. I'm a bit of a minimalist and poking you when it counts feels more impactful than machine gunning several smaller treatments. There may be exceptions to these with the polish projects posting given the schedules I line up with clients but generally speaking this is the idea. Moving on!

Animation Production & Upload Limitations:

For some of you who have been following my FA postings you'll have seen some discussion about the matter of posting and presentation. Animation differs a lot from standard image illustrations just by volume alone. This volume does not come without consequence, particularly in their size. I choose to start animating my works at 480p since that felt like the more optimal canvas size to work in, but lately I've been running various tests to move that definition up to HD at 720p, this is the largest allowable posting size for the sites I tend to host my work on so I'm content with this move. It does mean that each image might require more storage space which can compound the problem of upload limits.

At the moment the standard upload size I hit the ceiling at has been 10 megabytes. Its very small given my type of media production but this is also why Gifs have been a functional file format for the animations. Sure i can host much longer animations on 3rd party sites but I tend to be reluctant in having my viewers click on to a 3rd party host just to see what I have. You can be certain that a portion of that viewership will likely not do so - so for the benefit of convenience I have opted to maintain my posting pattern and upload the works where they have always been uploaded. However, this will require a bag of tricks if I plan on enhancing my cinematography moving forward. Among some of the plans I have is enriched color animations, vignette effects, HD all while maintaining smooth animation. This is a tall order to cover so I've had to make some sacrifices to the way I work. 

Since most animations I've produced thus far have run at a standard 24 frames a second I engaged in a few tests to see where I can cut corners without compromising the visual experience. Its no surprise that the exporter for my current tool sets are rather blunt in their ability to export small files, so 3rd party image compression software have helped a bit in this regard. I've also reduced the frame rate from 24 to 12 frames per second, you will likely not notice any difference with these adjustments, at least in most cases. However, reducing the frame rate does impact my ability to utilize camera movements in tracking and dollies -  zooms, pans and the like. I've uploaded two example sequences of a camera dolly zooming in, one using 12fps and the other 8fps. Wait.. Why 8 frames a second you ask? Well.. for my 30+ second projects I wanted to reduce the workload by shooting on 3s when running in 24 frames a second, that results in 8 frames showing up each second. Its more manageable work, the animation is put across despite a little bit of the choppiness. The camera would have fewer issues panning in 24fps in shots on 3 for this situation like the first example shows, but when forcing the frame rate to run at 8fps the camera pan is noticeably choppy as well. This can be very distracting for the viewer so for the time being I'll have to cut out pans for the longer animations. This might also have to be the case for shorter ones if the camera struggles to maintain a nice smooth unnoticeable motion. All that said, the benefits still exist with working in this time space, I've posted a few test animations with a jumping rabbit and biped walk cycle to illustrate the difference in the 12 and 8 frames per second sequencing. 

Changes like this have a real impact when you observe the file sizes especially when you look at the screenshot of both animations side by side in their respective sizes but with different frame rates. Kinda strange when you think about it, but less storage demand means I can explore the more elaborate animations - this is great since I intend on beefing up the quality with each project, you can see already that populating the timeline will be more dense and compact but as long as the flow is smooth and enjoyable I'd say its a win.

Other Notables:

As a final point I want to point out that I've finally begun utilizing Ko-fi, my donations page for tipping. After some brainstorming I've opted to make it a repository for various sketches and illustrative works, be they character sheets or life drawings, you name it. These will be freely available for anyone to check out and if personally compelled can donate too. I have a special budget jar set up to commit those donations to a new stylus pen (animation can take a lot out of those things so its always handy to replace them from time to time).

There's also been prospects and opportunities opening up for me recently to help assist other animators in their work so seeing involvement with collaboration projects and the like is quite possible. I have discussed the idea of expanding my commissions sheet to evolve into a services document - offering animations to prospective clients, assistance to prospective animators and possibly the addition of other more SFW avatar animations or everyday works for those who might exhibit more interest in how their characters behave - watching them come to life and the like. Some of this is still in the air but you can anticipate the changes I'm moving forward with to take place in the coming weeks.

Alright! I think that about covers everything, my second project has only recently begun so I'll preview more of that in the next snapshot two weeks from now. Until then see you all around!