What is the Hardest Thing in Animation

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Student that are doing attachment in my studio would usually post this question to me.

'What is the single most difficult thing about animation?'

To me, the most important thing is the idea. Every piece of idea must be appealing, creative, whacky, bordering on the edge of being loony but still quite acceptable. To make my point clearer, here are some examples.

It is difficult to differentiate a female animal character from a male. Here we use certain human features that is closely linked to the physical attributes of a human female character. The would have long eyelashes and some curves at the right places to suggest that the character is a female character.

In idealising our characters, we give it certain attributes such as aggression, temperament, physical features, this will be a telling characteristic that will register with the minds of its audiences.

Animators are generally artists, they draw and they sketch. So that is a character that is quite specific to us. Our storyboard are usually full of sketches in order for us to plan the story that we want to execute. Because the entire process involves many people, we have to tell each other the idea behind our work to generate a common theme. Generally because of the fusion of ideas, the creation process will be value added at each step.

The Concept of Background Artist

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Background artist to us play a very important role. They create the general mood for each scene. You need a right ambience to tell a story. It is like telling a horror story at night close to 12 a.m. when the wind is howling and it is raining heavily. That is when the 'feel' is right.

The process flow of a normal artwork.

In this piece of work the shadowing and lighting gives an idea of depth of field. This is important to give life to a 2D animation.

Here you have a creation of a background and the foreground before the insertion of a character, before the colouring process starts, we insert the character and we will play with a good mixture of colour, temperature and lighting before presenting a final piece for production.

credit to @zomagic