Puppet Updates 2 - Full Steam Ahead
Intro
The process of making Toonboom puppets is never a smooth or seamless process. One day things are smooth and the next day you get a new idea that upends all of the work you previously have made. In my case, back in March I had been focusing on making progress on the update. However, life happens and I seriously hurt my back. Right before my birthday in fact. I’m still not exactly sure what happened, or what I did to trigger the incident, but it was really bad, and left me effectively home ridden for a week. I can’t even be upset, because the situation had an element of humor to it, and eventually I’d like to tell it in the form of a Storytime short.
Alas, the injury was terrible and at the time of writing this blog, I’m still recovering. It has taken a while to get back into the groove of things, but with some effort I’ve gotten back to my usual pace. However, time waits for no one and in the time that I’ve been recovering, progress on the update has been slow.
Planning To Win
All progress on these puppet updates tend to be slow on average, just like anything related to animation is slow. While planning the update, I decided that it was going to be a year long project, so that makes progress extra slow. So missing a few days of work here or there is not much of a big deal in the grand scheme of things. The intention of this update is to get everything I want these puppets to have completed. I don’t know how feasible it will be to do these big updates in the future, so while I have the time I want to get as much done and do it right.
This means I have to be very intentional in planning things out. If all goes well, future updates will be smaller, and prevent me from increasing the amount of work to do.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though. In the present, the phase I am currently in is all about getting as much of my ideas out and visualized as possible. Effectively, I’ve been sketching, planning and rough animating things before finalizing them in Toonboom. Some of these include: poses, head rotations, proportion fixes and things of that nature. The big goal here is to get the visual language of the puppet to be consistent, pleasing and flexible. The current rendition of the puppet is functional, but it lacks the charm and flexibility of my earlier, non-Toonboom produced shorts. I want the new version to be oozing with charm, and far more friendlier to hand animation.
Angel Details
When it comes to these puppets, the head is probably the most important part. It has to be expressive, easy to use and animate in and more. Due to its importance, I’ve mostly focused on ironing out all of the issues I have with it over the past month. I took extra time to sketch out head positions as I will update the controllers to allow for better head rotations. I will say that sketching these extra positions have been a massive *PAIN*. It’s fine for now because it’s much easier to make changes in a sketch VS a puppet with 100s of layers. The head of the character is going to be constantly visible and it’s one of those things you don’t want to take shortcuts on so I don’t mind taking the time to get it right. I also don’t want any ugly key positions for the head.
Outro
This has not been a smooth process at all, but I believe once it’s done it’s going to be a huge level up. If I can pull this off, animation should be more easy, more dynamic and the characters should be far more pleasing to the eye. Ultimately I want it to elevate my content to a whole new level. I have no idea when it will be done, but hopefully I can get to the asset creation part of the process by summer.
Finally, I’ll be trying to document these updates as much as possible, so if you like seeing them and following the progress, definitely check back often. There’s a lot to the process I want to go over and I get excited talking about it.
That’s all for now! See you soon.
-Until next time-