Tracking progress

I decided to tackle this thing the best way I know how. With a mouse in flash.

For timing's sake, I'm sticking with 24 fps over 15. I'm using a combination of drawn frames and symbols. The head is mostly symbols. Things like his nose and ears and face parts stay the same while things like the rim of his cap and his mouth switch up. Even the M is split at the middle so that I can create an angled effect by squeezing one side while stretching the other. His eyes will blink as well, but for now I have sleepy eyes holding the place.

On top of a big fat mess of symbols and keys is a layer of keyframes. There I draw in over the imperfections of the symbols. Because he's drawn in chunks from a frontal view while he keeps turning sideways and his hat moves both in front and behind his head, pieces don't fit together flawlessly on their own. The top layer is drawn in to make it look like it does.

His arm is almost all keyframes except for long pauses. Same goes for his hand, which I found was a little more complicated to draw tweens for, but it's turning out well so far. I've been jumping around with the body parts. When I get tired of working on one part I'll work on another.

I'm looking forward to seeing it done. It's a lot of work, but it's worth it to become a better animator. I've got to keep pushing myself. And since this is a higher frame rate, and a character in a moving standing pose with a longer line of dialogue, it's more of a challenge. One concern I have however is that even though I put in the work, I need the aid of a computer to animate. I drew the keys by hand, but I don't know if I could do a full clean animation by hand or not. Flash makes it easier to fix inconsistencies in the drawings.