Hothouse 7: Rough Animation

The following is a guest post by Tabitha Fisher.

At this point in production I’m juggling several things at once. I’ve started to roughly animate my locked scenes in Flash while I also continue to work on editing the Leica! This isn’t typical for a regular animation pipeline, but in Hothouse we need to be clever with our time to achieve a finished film in 12 weeks. Here, I explain my basic approach to animating in Flash while using video reference:

With this setup I’m trying to simulate the experience of drawing from life in my sketchbook. Instead of rotoscoping, I have the video available to me on a second screen so I can scrub through to really feel the action as I animate on the Cintiq. Once I get the motion down, I’ll import a Quicktime version to Photoshop where I can use the Flash animation as a guide for my cleanup. The lines will be done with a custom brush that emulates the feel of ink on sketch book paper.