So I've already talked about The Easy Part of this project, but since this is one of the last few blog post I've going to be making about the process of things, I feel I must take about what I've been doing for the last 2 weeks. I've been animating and I've been slowly going crazy, but it's not that bad. I really like how things are turning out.
For animating I've been taking advantage of Blender, a free to download 3D animation software. I've used it a handful of times in the past, so I'm kind of familiar with the ins and outs of 3D modeling and animation. The funny part is, only some of that knowledge actually helped me because there is a HUGE difference between 3D animation and 2D animation.
I wanted my opening to include 2D animation, so why did I use a 3D animation software? Well, the program has settings built into it in order for a user to create a 2D animation in 3D space. To briefly explain, your camera view is locked down to a specific angle and axis meaning that as long what you animate remains in that range of few and the camera doesn't move, the animation can look 2D.
I started off with the main chunk, with each of the characters. I began with Line Guy, then Box Boy, and lastly with Hot Head. Before animating each character, I would sketch them out on the side to get an idea of scale and proportions. I began with animating Line guy on ones (every frame) I did this because I wanted he rising up animating to be smooth and organized since Line Guy's suit and character design is overall busy and could be confusing if it's seen in a rushed manner. When Line Guy was still I switched to animating on two (every 2 frames). I continued going on two following Line Guy's death to the red lines.
For Box Boy it was a similar process, sketch them out on the side, and then go from there. I started with the head and animated all the motion for it before doing anything else. Since Box Boy's character has more complex design features, I decided to animate them all on twos, with some excepts toward the end. Decreasing the frame rate also helped because Box Boy's spends more time on screen than Line Guy. I also made use of animated loops for when Box Boy stood idle. I would animate about 10 frames worth of material and loop that. I was initially going to do a similar thing with the eyes, I when I did a test run through, there was just way too much going on at once. I decreased the eyes to animate on fours (every 4 frames), but it almost gave me a headache seeing two different framerates in a small, busy space. I decided to make my life easy, and just made 1 main frame for the eyes and kept them there for most of the animation. Luckily for me that ended up with the best result.
For Box Boy's body, I had to do a bit of guesstimating on how a body would ragdoll into place. For help I looked at fish eye photos of people. As silly as they may look it has a similar idea in which you can't see the person's body because their head appears too big. For the color palette of Box Boy, I decided to go for a similar look as the scene itself. The character is mostly composed of just positive and negative space, so I made the main palette a light gray and a dark purple. When I went to fill in the sides of the head, I stuck with the same purple but I ran into an issue. I lost the depth and sense of dimension in the head as it got spun off. It just looked like a purple blob. To combat this, I made the fills and outlines two different purples. The outlines would remain with the light shade of purple, but the fills would take on a darker purple. 
Then it was on for Hot Head, while I go a little bit of experience working with different layers and colors with Box Boy, Hot head was the real challenge. I started with the outer flame (red) and then I went to orange and from orange I ended up at yellow. For this character I had to adjust the distance between layers and move certain layers so that they would appear on top of other layers. For the body I was initially going to give them a bomber jacket and pants, as I was sketching it out it felt too similar to Bod Boy. I decided to keep it simple and went with a lighter design. I also had to make the flame start semi-accurately and get blown out in a way that made sense.
While I spent most of my Spring Break working on the characters this wasn't the only moment to be animated. This past week I've been working on animating the portion of the credit sequence before the title card. Though still not fully finished. I've used just about all the tricks I learned with the character in order to make quick progress this portion of the opening. I animated on twos, used loops, reordered layers, and made use of some rotoscoping. 
Like I said towards the beginning I like how a lot of this is turn out. Of course I still have to finish a few things, but for now you can enjoy a brief snippet of shot I have to tweak a little bit.
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