And here we are, several months into 2021. I have the website up and running, at least a temporary banner in place and I’m ready to post my first update.
As I wrote in the “What is Waiting to Fly?”, this project is the story of someone who has been waiting, but not flying. There’s more, but I’ll let that unfold as the project progresses. I started by blocking out my ideas as simple thumbnails, not much bigger than a postage stamp. I work on paper, at least initially, so that I don’t let the technology get in the way of my momentum. It also allows me to work in any room of the house (or even out of the house) and not be tied to my PC. Soon I felt the need to be able to arrange the little boxes around and focus more on the camera staging. I moved up to a series of 3×5 index cards. I have probably a third to half of the idea sketched out.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what will become my production pipeline – or at this point, my pre-production pipeline. I have a lot to do and prepare before I start animating. So, to test that out, and to reach my goal of getting my first post online this first weekend of May 2021, I jumped ahead and began the animatic before having all my shots sketched out.
Process was as such:
1) Scan in the 24 cards (4 per page).
2) Crop and resize to 1920×1080.
3) Import into Krita as animation frames.
4) Export and upload.
It’s a bit time consuming. It’s not pretty. My little pencil sketches are very rough. However, now that I have them as a guide in my Krita file, the next step would be to redraw them, fleshing out the gestures & expressions, working out an actual sense of timing (it’s simply 1 frame/second at the moment), and, well, sketching out that other half to two-thirds that I said I was still missing.
So there you have it. The first step on this journey.