Rough Animation Begins

Last week, was a good week...

The 24 Hours Animation Contest happens this time every year and while the student teams were busy making their films, I was busy working on mine. I roughly animated a few scenes for pencil testing and then made rough Scene layouts for all the other scenes. 
Here's one of them...

WC02_SC18Test from Toondini on Vimeo.

 After the storyboards are finally figured out, its time to break down each storyboard into Scene layouts, each scene has its own Scene Folder. Here are all 40 of them for WatchCat episode 2, which now weighs about 6 lbs altogether.
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I tell my students they should create Scene Folders like these, in order to keep track of all the animation scenes they will be generating along the way. Each Scene Folder has a form on the front describing what is in the folder as well as what work has been done already. Here is a copy of the Scene Folder form I use...

The Weighting game...

If you think about it, your idea starts off weightless and in 2D, the layout drawings are based off the final storyboard panels. As I mentioned before right now those layout drawings weigh about 6 pounds. As we move into rough animation, the weight of each folder will increase because more drawings will be created. This is the process of 2D animation, not only does it take time to produce, but as more drawings are made, the heavier the folders become.

And so, as you are waiting to read future postings; Can you make a guess below, how much the final episode will weigh when completed? 

Once the rough animation is finally completed in 2019 (ha,ha), I will let you know the final weight.