Animator Interview with dizzier_izzy! (Patreon)

Hello, hello!

This week we've got a little interview that our dear director Mystery did with dizzier_izzy, one of the animators for Enrapture.

(A brief note before: Gartic Phone night with the team is this Friday (May 17th), so if you have any prompts you'd like to submit, please comment them on the Gartic post. Okay with housekeeping out of the way, enjoy~)

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You’re technically now our designated character animator so how do you decide certain expressions on certain beats?

Oh gosh haha, feeling honored to be "technically designated character animator!"

When figuring out the expressions on certain beats I always went back to the storyboards and expression sheets that had been done up at the start of the project and made sure to keep them close on hand, as they really helped in pacing my work as well. The embarrassing part about actually deciding and drawing out the expressions is that, just like with any other drawing I do, I was sort of pulling different faces while playing through the voice lines and seeing what felt natural. I probably looked really really strange so I'm glad I was alone doing it. That and I tried to think how to make him look as pathetic as possible because who doesn't love a sub loser Miguel?

How did you go about going through? How did you start and what was your process through it?

When I started on my favorite and longest cut I was finally finding my footing within the project and trying to observe how everyone else was doing theirs. But only really when it came to how their final products looked, because everybody had such a different workflow and process unique to themselves and was finding my own and figuring out what worked best for me, which was a little all over the place.

Breaking it down into sections really helped me, even if that feels a bit obvious. When starting out on 6E (my personal favorite part of mine) I really wanted to try and make sure it fit into the project, so after I did all my observing and gathered all of the Miguel references I needed, I got straight into it. I keyed it out by sticking very close to the pacing of the storyboard and drawing out roughs of each shot, so that's how I sort of set things up. Once I had what was the bones of the animation, I started to go through them section by section and draw keyframes of all the major movements, then added my in-betweens after. I hit a bit of a roadblock when it came to keeping consistency between the different segments of animation, so there was a lot of back and forth, but I managed to get somewhere I was happy with in the end.

What's your favourite thing to animate about Miguel? Also least favourite!

My favorite thing to animate about Miguel? Probably his tiddies. Or my more normal answer which is possibly his nose! I love the shape of his nose so much, and even though it was tricky to get the hang of at first, I ended up loving drawing it. Noses are so expressive and I think it's definitely and underrated part of the face when it comes to animating emotions and movement in the face.

My LEAST favorite part of Miguel to animate hands down has to be his hair. So many small details that can easily get lost or confused, especially in bigger movements. I wrestled with his hair in basically every part I've done, and I can't tell if drawing it over and over again will help me get better at it in the long run, or turn me to a life of drawing him bald forever.