S T U D I O P R A C T I C E: OUAN405 - Establishing Workflow

I've spent some time investigating working methods and discovering the tools available to me whilst using the Photoshop timeline feature which is the main tool I'll be using to create my animation in Photoshop. Up to now I've pretty much nailed down all of my ideas and designs, and I have a good vision of how I will spend the rest of my time creating the animation. I intend firstly to finish making the background image which will act as the environment for the characters will move in. I plan to use the sketch I made to design the initial background and adapt it in much more detail in the correct perspective in order to make it suitable for the final sequence. This paint over shouldn't take me too long and I intend to have it completed by the end of today.

After experimenting further with the timeline feature I now feel much more comfortable moving forward to the animation process where I will be drawing the frames. The way I have established I'm going to do it is using a video layer and drawing each frame of the characters movement with the background I've made as the layer behind. A tool that I think is almost essential that I will be using that I've found is the 'onion skins' function, that allows you to see the previous frame or frames if you want. This will make the process of keeping track of characters movement much easier and will allow me to produce the animation with much more stable procedure of calculating character positions for the next frames and having an idea of what needs to be drawn for each frame. Aside from this I've also found some interesting features that will allow me to quickly add in transitions such as fade and zoom, meaning I can manipulate the camera a little to make some of the shots more interesting and add overall variation to the cinematography in the animation.

In order to experiment with the features and gather a feel for how the different effects work I added a couple of surrogate characters that would allow me to imagine and manipulate the environment around them as if it was the actual animation with characters and transitions. This just gave me a sense of what I would be able to do and how I would be able to do it. Since starting to experiment with the software and establishing how certain things would be achieved I now have a much greater idea of how to proceed and manage the work flow for the rest of the animation.