Game Over (Patreon): Abby's New Year's Fireworks (Patreon)

Synopsis/Description:

It may be late in the month, But it's still the beginning of the year and the end of last!  Should Abby be celebrating that close? Probably not...
Either way, New Year, same old Abby, and it's still...

GAME. OVER.

(Press start/insert coin to continue?)

The Rant:

So this is a little late, huh?

yeeeaaaaaahhhhh....

That being said, this will be going live (publicly) on the last Thursday of the month, so I like to think it's still appropriate since its still the first month of the year.

This one was actually surprising ling complicated. Well, for me. I know some of you guys consider what I do wizardry in the first place, but you also know that I use a lot of cheats to work around what should normally be difficult work.

Like, ....

take this animation, for example:

This was made entirely in Photoshop, and each frame was roughed out, then line-art-ed, then color-flatted, then shaded. I forget the exact process, but either all of those had to have their own layers for each individual frame of each individual step, or I went back and drew those steps on each individual frame, hoping that I wouldn't need to go back and edit something later. 

And because Photoshop's UI isn't built for animation, this took way longer than it would have in Flash/Animate or ToonBoom. 

(This was done in photoshop because the tablet pen I was using at the time wasn't compatible with Adobe Animate or ToonBoom)

Contrast...

Not as smooth, sure, but way more consistent and detailed as well. This is because Pauline is comprised of parts that can be manually edited and swapped out, as opposed to frames which need delicacy and time.

Not only was it done in a fraction of the time (a few hours, as opposed to the several hours of the Rosalina animation), but it's way easier to create and encorporate variants, too!

In the case of this animation, it means I can string together a bunch of different animations and focus on each one individually, rather than having to focus on the whole frame at the same time. 

In the case of the countdown, I have:

• Abby, first struggling (1st Animation), then reacting to the drop (2nd animation)
• The Ball slamming down with each count
• The background star-to-motion-smear

This is where it gets complicated. Abby struggling is no big deal, but the reaction to the drop, where she pulls back, and then slams close to the camera is a little more complicated, because Abby is a largely flat character (not like that), and it can be hard to portray perspective like that with flat characters. Luckily, her parts can be easily manipulated to simulate such an effect, with only a few substitutions (hair, boobs). And because she's facing the camera head on, I can mirror her legs so I don't have to do as much work. Sadly, I had to manually draw her torso, boobs and head (rather than using a mirror tool) because Animate doesn't have anything like that.

Once that was blocked out, the next hardest bit was the star-smear. Not so much the speed line or the composition, but rather, how it would smooth from sitting flat to streaking lines. Well, to start, I animated A streak, duplicated that finished animation a few times, offset their timing so they wouldn't all move at the same time, and then compiled all that into a looping animation. So, I had my fall. To transition into that, I created a map of stars, and then slowly tweened them upwards when Abby started falling. Once she reached top speed, I swapped out the star map for the streak loop, so it looks like the stars just started also reaching top speed.

Not gonna lie, pretty proud with how that turned out.

Another thing that's cool about working with an animation program and substitutions is that I can put multiple instances of an animation within the same composition!

...which is what I did for the failscreen!

Sadly, I couldn't just render it semi-transparent, because then Abby's parts would become individually transparent (rather than the entire thing), so I instead adjusted the color to match the background instead.

Initially, Abby was going to shy away from the fireworks, but that was too much work to figure out, and I hadn't blocked it out well enough to convey that in the acting, so it goes back to generic struggling instead.

I think that works better though; Abby works best when she's flabbergasted and not scared, so you're excited about what she gets into, but not so worried for her that you're afraid for her.

As for the fireworks themselves, I cribbed them from my SFW comic's fireworks, that I'd animated some time prior. I could have just used the same principles and animated it again, but I felt they worked well enough that I could get away with it. It also helps that these two communities are rather separate (and my SFW profile is significantly less well known than my NSFW one, despite my best efforts), so it'd be hard to put two and two together that the animation was reused. That being said, it's not a good habit to get into, because not everything is so widely applicable as to be reusable, so I'm probably not gonna do something lik that again.

Either way, I think it turned out rather well!

Here's hoping 2021 is less of a crapshoot than 2020!

What do you think? 

Let me know in the comments! 

Your feedback lets me know how I'm doing! Thank you for your continued support and patronage, and I'll catcha over yonder!

-Saunter!