my first Animatic!

I took this four-week class on drawing and story-boarding, and absolutely loved it! You'd be surprised how many drawings it takes to get a decent storyboard going for an animation project. When you take thumbnail drawings and place them on a frame-by-frame timeline, you get a very basic rough idea of what the actual animation is supposed to look like.

Here's what I did in the span of an hour's worth of drawing 20 different frames:

It's really cool when you see the motion happening between drawings! In terms of my skills, I learned that I take up a lot of time worrying about the details of an figure or object, rather than focusing on the movement and the supposed 'action' of a character. It's a perfectionist's problem I guess, but I am working out of that habit. Right now I'm getting really into drawing with ink again, as it helps me learn to work around mistakes and just look at the overall concept of an image.

Here's an apple study I did with ink:

This week I'm going to San Francisco to look at an animation program. I'm hoping I can visit Pixar while I'm over there! =P