Animating from Pencil to PC: Rough Motion Sketches

Now we’re going to do our first in-between. Again, this isn’t a sequential drawing, but instead the drawing that covers the midpoint of the motion between your first and second keys. When in-betweening, you tend to work that way, in successive iterations until you’ve filled enough frames for smooth motion and to match your timing. The more frames you have, the slower but smoother the motion will be; you kind of learn to plan that instinctively, as well, once you get used to understanding how many of these drawings take up a second of motion. Most of the time, if you’re working in Flash for web animation, you’ll work at 12 frames per second. I’m doing mine at 15 frames per second, which is the standard for basic television animation, while cinematic animation is generally done at 30 frames per second.

Back on the topic of the in-between drawing: I don’t know if you remember this little trick, but it helps a great deal in accurately drawing the image that marks the halfway point between starting and ending. What you do is pick major points on your drawing – top of the head, point of the chin, each shoulder, the waist, the neck, etc. – and draw lines connecting those points from the first drawing to the last. Then mark off the halfway point on those lines, and you’ll have where those major points in the drawing should be on your in-between.