sitkahameha.pclx (1.8 MB) tell me how it is and be very, brutally honest if you have tout keep in mind I’m new, its not yet finished but it is a great paint o make it still.
@New_animator I cannot take a look right now. I can’t promise a review but I’ll bookmark this in case I manage to have time off from my job to give you an constructive opinion.
If you want more people to look at it quickly though, you can also try to export a GIF from Pencil2D so other users can watch it on repeat directly on the forum.
Is this your first time animating?
To be honest, the animation is very primitive, but everyone has to start somewhere. My first animation is just dots moving around. Keep going and you’ll soon learn the ins and outs of animation. Just have fun.
@Ralmon thank you for being honest I’m kinda a Dragon Ball Z fan even though I only watched in the Fortnite collab (HAHAHAHAH), so a Kamehameha came to mind first, and yes it is my first time animating. Thank you for your opinion and thank you for taking the time to watch this horrible animation (haha)
@JoseMoreno that is fine I wasn’t really going for everyones opinion, I just wanted a general idea of how well I’m doing for my first unfinished and really bad animation, but if you do take the time to make an opinion thank you in advance!
tell me how it is and be very, brutally honest if you have to but keep in mind I’m new, its not yet finished but it is fun, yet great pain to make it still. read this instead of the opening message
@New_animator Hey. Yeah so I saw the animation.
Disclaimer: I dropped a wall of text of to explain a few simple concepts that I think are most important when starting out and one doesn’t know about art stuff necessarily. I suggest you read the thing slowly, and from time to time or else you’ll be bored and won’t understand it.
A few words first …
When I see in your work I personally don’t think it’s “bad”. I do see potential to improve, but it’s obviously a potential that needs to be developed. And while there are many ways to go about this, you might need to consider exactly what you want to focus on, while developing your skills.
It’s important to note that animation and drawing are two skills that need to be trained separately.
If you want your drawings to communicate better what you see in your imagination, then you could work on improving character design, anatomy & gesture drawing for starters.
However If you just want to have fun with animation for now, and perhaps later on get serious with it, I think using stickmen is great until you feel the need to draw more complex characters.
So let’s talk animation only. To me, personally, animation as a whole can be boiled into two things; two main ingredients that need to be no matter what:
Consistency & credibility (Ft. storytelling)
Click to read my POV on which overall skills anyone need to develop when starting out
These concepts are what drive the pursuit and understanding of what animation really is.
To train for consistency you need to try drawing your stickmen with the same shape in every drawing while keeping their proportions* “consistent”, basically this is built when training drawing skills.
Hand-eye coordination gives you accuracy and confidence in the things you’re drawing.
*Proportion is the size of something relative to other things, characters or buildings, as well as the size of their internal parts relative to itself.
Of course I’m not saying you can’t make characters look wobbly all the time, it can be fun if done correctly for comedy or style, but to me it can lose the spectator interest if they are just vibrating on the screen all the time mindlessly, unless that’s what you actually want, which is also totally fine & valid.
To train for credibility, or believability, is a bit harder, because you really need to study, even when not trying to, how things in the real world move and then try to adapt that into the animation style you’re going for.
It’s very different to move things or characters doing whatever for the sake of moving them on a screen, and another thing to move them in a way where they remind you of stuff you’ve experienced in real life. That’s really where credibility is established.
That’s why seeing the Coyote falling from a cliff feels like it’s happening yet it’s still funny. Something being believable doesn’t mean it’s IRL, It’s not quote unquote “real” but you believe it because all the motion and character acting leads you to believe that he’s really falling after chasing the roadrunner.
From a cinematographic point of view, there’s something that also needs to be worked on while creating animation, and it’s the what; the point of your animation. That’s where storytelling starts to creep in
So, what are you trying to say with animation? Even If you’re just working on simple excercises that’s fine at first, but later on you are going to want to tell a story. Even if it’s a simple one it needs to connect with your audience.
For example here’s what I consider a great example of an animation film that’s using several apparently disconnected ideas to create a story that’s believable, funny and it’s made with super simple characters, made by DON HERTZFELDT
If you saw this nowadays you wouldn’t believe this was nominated for the 2001 Academy Award in Best Animated Short Film.
While it looks deceptively simple, the characters are purposedly drawn simply, however they have a certain degree of consistency & credibility embedded into them.
Underneath it all what matters is not just how the characters look, or how they move, but how the animation was used as a tool to tell an engaging story.
So yeah … back to the review
Click to read some specific points about your animation related to the previous section
I needed to lay the previous wall of text to have some common vocabulary we could talk about. Sorry about the length.
Back to your work: So from observation you have a rando throwing a kamehameha to another dude, and the latter freaks out. 'kay, it’s fun If i see it once, but everyone does it nowadays. It’s become a meme of sorts.
So what can you do to improve on that? If we think about the three points I made above: consistency, credibility & storytelling What happens after the kamehameha is thrown?
Does the dude get zapped? Do they reject it with a slap? do they eat it and then burp? Creating a short story in the form of a joke or visual gag usually has a pattern, and currently the resolution / punchline is missing.
Try to have the characters be more consistent when drawn. As in they are drawn with similar lines, shapes, and proportions every single frame.
They can get squashed & stretched comically at specific moments to reinforce a joke, but if they deform all the time it becomes visual noise and our brains just filter that.
Lastly to make it more believable consider timing out how the characters do their movements. What pro animators usually do is they take a stopwatch, film themselves or check out video reference of real life situations to get a knack for how any given motion can happen and then adapt that into their work.
In the case of throwing energy from your hands like Goku, you can simply act it out for yourself to understand how your arms bend, while answering questions to define how the action ahppens.
Like how would the character charge up the power? how does he release it? how long does the crouching position last? how long does the throwing power lasts?
Obviously when animating one needs A LOT of patience and mental endurance, but doing these things continuously for every animation you make will dramatically improve how other people perceive your work in my opinion.
Last words …
I hope you get something out of this, and of course I hope you continue working out your animation, having fun with it.
If by chance you are trying to use social media to share your work, just keep doing what you want to do without putting too much importance in views, likes or what not. Animate for yourself first and do something that brings you joy or else later on you mght end up hating it. Peace.
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