Tim Allenby's "Grave Mistake"!

I recently volunteered to be an assistant animator on a third year student's final film: Grave Mistake, a funny and frantic story of Death trying to recover the soul of a girl he accidentally reaped before her time. You can see a ton of material relating to the film, including the animatic, on its website - my job is the seemingly small, but important task of animating background characters. Click Read More to see my design sketches, animation thumbnails and, of course, final animations!

The film depicts Heaven as a giant nightclub, so I hit on the idea of combining people who would be likely to show up in Heaven with those likely to show up at a nightclub: in other words, old people dressed for a rave.

After jotting down the basic idea, I refined the designs to bring them closer to the film's style (in this drawing they're still not quite there yet, but getting better). When I showed these drawings to the director, Tim, he was happy with them as long as I keep edging ever closer to the film's style; he also mentioned wanting "all races, genders and ages" for the crowd scenes (Heaven is for everyone). Because of this, I decided to animate a younger background character as well:

Tim mentioned the possibility of assistant animators sneaking their characters into the background, so I did just that with the character Jull (in his human disguise) from my webcomic Mudskipper. I adjusted his proportions to fit the style of the film, thumbnailed beginning and end keyframes of his idle animation...

...and did the same with an old woman who might as well smoke now that she's dead.

Here's the rough animation I did for Julien's idle animation (a concept that'll be familiar to video game animators, but which has its uses in film too, as I learned here); it plays faster than I intended. Unfortunately I no longer have the rough animation for my smoking granny (I'll be more careful about saving different versions of my work next time), but animating her was an especially good learning experience:

I wanted her to very visibly inhale as she draws on her cigarette, but found it difficult to wrap my head around her torso and abdomen symbols in addition to her facial animation. When I showed the above animation to Tim, he said "I can see what you're trying to do, but you've given yourself more work than you need" - something that was hard, but necessary, to hear. 

So I decided to scrap the torso and abdomen movements entirely, and was left with this for the finished animation. 

This is almost the finished animation for Jull - I tried to give his legs the same treatment as the granny's body and remove their movement altogether, but my attempt at doing so just made it worse. (This GIF also plays faster than it does in Flash.) And that's why I learned that I dislike animating with symbols - I feel guilty saying it, and it's not a reflection on Tim in the slightest (he was extremely helpful and patient when I needed assistance), it's just that everything needs to be in absolutely the right place before you can get stuck in animating, unlike in hand-drawn animation where you can just plough ahead and only worry about drawing.

So I think I'll stick to frame-by-frame 2D from now on - but I'm very glad I participated in this project; it gave me an informed opinion to base that choice off of, and hey, if I ever absolutely need to animate symbols, I can. Tim was a joy to work with; very clear about what he wanted and eager to solve any questions anyone had. I wish him and Grave Mistake the best of luck!