Comic Report #64.1 - Gears In Motion (Patreon)

Hello again!  This week I've been making headway on the page 600 animation; this is going to take me a little while to get through so I think these will end up being next Friday's update as well, but I will absolutely have this piece done inside the month of June.  For now, though, here's where my process has taken me this week:

Patrons who follow both my comic and our gamedev work may find the header image of this article a bit familiar, the format is closer to my gamedev posts than my comic ones.  Over the years my animation techniques on these 100-mark pages have evolved; working on animation in my comic has helped me develop the skillset to tackle game animation, and then now my game animation workflow is being ported back into my comics.  It's a bit of a creative ouroboros, looping back to where it started, but if this is my last 100-mark animation page then I think it's a good way to approach it.  

The front half of this comic is where all the major work takes place.  In older 100-mark pages I would animate with a kind of paperdoll segmented technique and just slide the pieces around, but the more modern 100-marks have more actual tweening and drawing individual poses, which is how I animate our game art.  This week I blocked in most of the hard stuff, the panels I didn't get to are planned to be way, way easier.

To start off, panel 1 of the comic is planned to be an exterior shot of Tombstone Gate B, with Deon and Donna commanding the gates.  Here is my animation mockup so far:

I needed a simple loop for Deon, just gesturing with his hand to pull the gate bus backwards.  The way I capture these kinds of animations is to animate the arm easing from the end state back to the beginning state and then using a snappy in-between to pull the arm forward again, to give it the kind of kick motion I am looking for.

For Donna I wanted to do something special.  In the comic I draw a lot of her sign language, so on this page I wanted to try animating a short phrase in ASL.  I did a bit of homework and I think "welcome home" is a good phrase that can be conveyed with one hand that would fit nicely into the timeframe of this shot.  The open-palm-up extended and then swinging towards the chest is "welcome", and then the fingertip pinch gesture at the chin moving to the ear is "home", from what my research told me.  Drawing Donna signing is a lot of fun so I'm happy the story beats aligned to let her be in a 100-mark page like this.

The action of panel 2 is fairly simple, the bus pulls back and reveals the truck grill.  What I'll probably end up doing for this shot in the actual painting segment is duplicate the bus piece a bunch of times and paint-edit the lighting to make the wheel look like its rotating and the bus reflections shift with its movement.  I don't need to 100% sketch out all my mockups, to save time I can block in the broad movement and then use some of my other effort-saving techniques to produce the individual animation assets when I'm in the paint.  This combined with the previous panel are the initial reveal hit so if I don't need it to be too complicated to sell what I want it to say I shouldn't make extra work for myself.

And speaking of extra work...

This was the shot that I mentioned last week was going to be a killer.  This is the other panel aside from the first that needs a lot of actual frame animating, so I put time into getting it rigged up right how I need it.  The plan for this is to have a crowd and have the four main crew characters run in and join the scene, looking up at the camera as a shadow from the truck creeps in.  In my block-ins I mostly only just sized the character approximately how I needed to, which you can see here with Lou and Monday on the right, who I haven't gotten to yet.  For Lizzie and Alice on the left I planned their run-in cycle somewhat efficiently- instead of redrawing the whole pose from shot to shot like I would with my gamedev art I just kinda duplicated and moved the head-and-torso mockups I had and positioned them in the frames to give a sense of the approaching momentum, fast at first and slowing into the final position, so that the timing and spacing would be where I needed it.  I then went in and drew their legs hopping along, since the leg animation carries each frame into the next this is important for me to block in accurately at this phase, but the upper body animation isn't as important so I'm not bothering with that yet.  Like panel 2, the upper body movement is something I can get mileage from by duplicating and making lighting and movement edits to rather than draw from scratch, so to save myself some time the block-in on these run animations is mostly just the half I need to get the job done.

The killer part of this page isn't just the run animation, it's also the rest of the crowd around the main cast.  One of my missions for fleshing out Tombstone is rather than letting it be just an anonymous sea of buildings I want to specifically design the setting as an actual Place, which I think I wrote up about earlier this year, on how I define what building is where in the background of which scene location.  A second layer of this is to make sure the cast of background characters aren't just perpetually new throwaway, I need to pepper some similar background characters from other shots in to make it feel like these people do actually live here.

As you could see in the header image of this article I broke the crowd up into four chunks to try and keep it a bit more natural than just a wad of people, since I think crowds tend to coalesce into chunks as they fill out.  Once I had my chunks I kinda added more people to spackle in the seams, and when the crew run in they will spackle the gaps and complete the shot.  Having these guys as four separate chunks will make it easier for me to animate them, since I can add small movement where needed and then control which frame those animations play on according to when the crew runs take place, so it will save me a lot of coordinating to just be able to say, okay, cluster 2 starts playing its sub-animations starting on this frame when Liz or Alice run by.  Easy peasy.

A lot of what I know about animation is either self-taught or directed by actual animators, like "learn the 12 principles".  One of the terms I gleaned from listening to animators talk is "incidentals", or the recurring background characters I mentioned earlier.  To fill out this shot I went through some of my other pages and picked out incidentals I hadn't reused yet, as I have used a few and I don't want to keep reusing just them.  Here's a quick review of the characters I've put into this crowd:

I added a couple new incidentals to the shot so it isn't just all the same people but many of the faces in the crowd can be seen in other pages.  These aren't all throwaways, of course. The job director Marcus Malloy is important to the town's functioning, the little girl who delivered the "you gotta come fill in at work, sorry!!" note to Lizzie is one of the kids who were on a roof tossing gallons of expired milk onto the pavement, and the milk-tossing kid is also here with her.  The two doctors are in the bottom right cluster, Dr. Pfeiffer is mostly there to fill out the med staff being present, but the important inclusion is Dr. Parker.

One of the long-term little details I had in building up Tombstone was the specific inclusion of Dr. Parker as Alice's new boss and the town's medical authority.  I could have given her any name in the world but I chose Dr. Parker because she is specifically related to another character, tucked away in the website's cast page:

Melody Parker was one of the Omni-Mart workers the crew befriended hundreds of pages ago, and since I'd been planning to bring them back I wanted to include a family member of theirs in the town, so when they arrive...

... Mom is there waiting in the crowd for her.

Over this weekend I should be able to wrap up the rest of the animation staging and outlining and then start inking and painting the panels.  I expect next Friday I should have an in-progress shot half-painted, and then sometime over the week after that update this page will be ready to save and upload to the site.  This is a lot of work, and I spent a bit of time before committing to it tying up some other loose work ends, so I want to say thank you for the patience while I tackle this task.  Even if the surprise of the page is a bit spoiled by seeing these in-progress shots, I hope the end product will still be worth the wait.  See you next week!