Fanimations (Early Acces): "Hip: No. 515" (Patreon)

Synopsis/Description: 

 I have no idea what's on Hip: No. 515, but its gotta be pretty great to keep Tempson's Harriet so enthralled! 

The Rant: 

So, as some of you on Discord (Note: should I make a server? I've tried before, with my SFW content and its kind of a zombie because you have to have an audience/community-base to keep it from becoming an art-spam dumpster) might have noticed, I have a propensity for seeking inspiration from other friends' illustrations and turning them into animations. Well, "propensity" is a bit much, its only been done a few times:

Tightly Doodles: 

Bound Pretties: 

PenKen: 

Granted, part of this is because the animations should be relatively simple. Keywords being "should be" and "relatively." One or two major major poses, some squash and stretch to sell the exaggeration, and some smear frame to connect the dots and we're good, right?

Not so much.

For starters, one of the things that trips up newbie animators, whether they're starting from scratch as artists or transitioning from another discipline like illustration is the idea that all parts of an object being animated move at the same time. Ex: when a person turns their head, the eyes will turn at the same time the neck does, with the hair not reacting to air resistance or physics and retaining its perfect shape with no overlapping animation once the turn is completed. This give the animation a robotic/toy-like feel because none of this stuff happens all at the same time, or in the same sequence: the eyes move first, the neck rotates after the eyes to give them a wider cone of vision in the direction they want to face, and the hair  reacts after the head as begun turning, and takes a while to settle afterwards, because there are no muscles in the hair to direct the hair to stop moving.

Part of the problem is because of how much you have to juggle in a single image, often without the ability to check the context of your frame within the completed animation. Everything I just mentioned has to be in play within a single image that you've spent 10-30 min conceptualizing just to be correct within illustration constraints ( a discipline all its own). By the 20 min mark, if you don't have thumbnails/storyboards to base your animation off of, you've probably forgotten the temporal context your frame has to reside in, and so while it looks good as an individual frame, as an animation, it tends to either look robotic, or like the boobs/hair have a mind of their own.

One workaround is to just be that good/fast and/or optimize your creative process to appear good/fast so your ideas come together better faster, and you can focus on the larger picture. That's part of why I seem so fast to you guys; after grinding out animations for 10 years, finding illustration shortcuts (simplified designs and lighting structure, detailing only where necessary) is VERY easy. The downside is that those types of animation can appear VERY rough (if very smoothly animated) and it takes even longer to perfect drawing quickly AND cleanly (the latter of which I haven't perfected). On a personal note, because I also have training with sequential art, I tend to hone in on details others don't, like line-weight and texture, which also hampers my speed and stresses me out (which is part of why my pencil illustrations tend to look way more different than my inked ones). 

However, I've been working on another optimization method: Using assets, or symbols.

This is a spritesheet, for context, every individual asset of this animation, in addition to every unique frame of said individual assets, the compiled Harriet symbol, and the symbol of Harriet compiled into the background.

(I promise it doesn't normally look this intimidating)

Breaking Harriet into the individual assets of her body allows me to focus on individual assets as necessary, like being able to focus on her spiraling eyes individually, rather than being forced to remember color placements WHILE focusing on the rest of her body. It also allows me to focus on the big picture, normally by drawing out each frame, and then separating the elements of each frame into symbols and editing and replacing them as necessary. Not pictured: the rough version of this before each element was cleaned up. Speaking of, it allows me to do a rough animation, and once the animation is finalized, only worry about cleaning up the assets, rather than cleaning up every single frame, since cleaning up the assets imports those cleaned frames over every instance where those assets appears.

The downside to this method is that it can explode your asset library VERY quickly, which is why its best used for repeating animations, like in games, or in serieses where you know the characters will be using the assets you've built (for example, try searching "My little pony flash puppet" on DeviantArt). The other issue is that, some actions are so dynamic, that its not worth it to build a library of loops, because you end up doing more work than if you'd just drawn everything traditionally.

That being said, I'm working out how to do it consistently, which is where a lot of these Wednesday loops are coming from. It helps that kink leans towards loops anyway (at least the kink I engage in that you guys support me for), as opposed to dynamic 15 second stories that I usually do in my SFW.

Unique to Harriet however are two things: Color and Style. 

Usually, when I color, or specifically light my illustrations/animations, there's a flat transparent color that I use for the entirety of the composition because it affects the entire composition in different ways. Same with highlights and shines.  This is made easier in vector programs, because, once everything is lit, I can just replace the 50% black/white with the necessary 50% insert-color-here.  However, because I don't know how Tempson colors their illustrations (or this one in particular) Its hard to apply that mentality here because it might not come out looking like their illustration (which I want to stay accurate to; I want it to look like Temp animated it themselves, rather than the Saunter remix). So, in this scenario, every color had to be lifted from the original illustration, lights, shadows, and other wise. In hindsight, I think its just a generic transparent "black" but better safe than sorry.

Also, I could have asked Temp, but you guys have no idea how much I get off on surprised happy reactions to the stuff I make for people. Even if the surprise carries and builds, I like the surprise that comes from knowing someone likes you enough to not just do fanart but emulate everything about how you do what you do, so I try to get as far as I can without having to inform the recipient they're getting art. (This is also where all the birthdays come from)

the other thing that's unique to Harriet is "style." You might have noticed that, in the Tightly Doodles and Bound Pretties gifs, my response was more "my style" than "theirs." In the case of Tightly's, I wasn't confident enough to emulate their style directly, so I went with my own. With BoundPretties, I figured the emphasis would be more so enough on Naomi's body than her expression (since her face is so scrunched up) that it would be fine to stick to my style. However, with PenKen and Tempson, their style seeps into so much of their designs, that you can't really fudge it.  Sure, I cheated with the lighting in reference to Pen's Naomi, but with Harriet being fully colored, you can't really get away with it. The goal, for the most part, is to make it look like the original illustrator animated it, with as few deviations as possible, and I hope that comes across. I'd originally considered an "underwear" alternate of this, but as I did more cleanup, that idea died for two reasons. Her posing is unique to her wearing a hoodie; what whould/should she be doing with her hands that would be identical in posing without the hoodie for context? and two, I'm not confident enough to emulate Temp's clothesless style, especially since Harriet's body shape (particularly her bust and hips) changes depending on whether or not the drawing is intended to be sexy or expressive. Also, as you guys know, I always have a lot more work to be doing, so I think it was better not to, in this instance.

But honestly, I'm hoping reading all this doesn't turn anyone away from trying out animation, or make you feel compelled to "respect" me more or something. Because of how far the workflow has come, these are becoming easier and easier to make, in conjunction with the game overs. Its just that, when you break down commercial art, there's a LOT going on behind the scenes. It is intimidating, but if you stick with it, you'll get better than me a lot faster!

What do you guys think? Let me know in the comments; your input lets me know how I'm doing! Thanks for your support and patronage, and I'll catcha over yonder!

-Saunter!