Mid-July, we finally published publicly the code of GIMP Motion, our software for animations in GIMP. It is available on GIMP official source code repository under the same Free Software license (GPL v3 and over).
We don’t have a public GIMP release containing this plugin yet. Hopefully it should happen soon, but the code is still much too experimental and incomplete. We are using it daily internally and you are welcome to do so as well, but the released version will be much better. 🙂
So it means that for the time being, if you want to play with it, you will have to build it yourself from source, or wait for someone to make a build (we may provide one at some point).
The video above describes some of the base features for simple animations, such as storyboards/animatics and most common needs for animated images (GIF, Webp…). What we call “simple animations” is when you mostly have several images which you want to succeed at one another. No complex composition with background and character layers for instance. New features will still happen, for instance for panning/tilting/zooming on bigger panels (very common on storyboards as well), and adding various effects (a keyframed blur for instance would be a common movie effect).
We will soon publish a second part video where we will describe the more advanced features for complex animation (the ones with layered background/foreground/characters). Because we just scratched the surface of what we will be able to do with this plugin. 🙂
In an animation film, obviously the design does not refer only to characters. There can be props design when applicable, and of course background design. As an example, the most interesting case is how we designed ZeMarmot’s home! At least the outside part of its burrow, since we never see the inside (unlike in the initial comics attempt).
You remember the first research trip? Back then, we found this nice hill, next to Saint-Véran village with just a single tree in the middle.
The tree on the hill: ZeMarmot movie reference
And obviously on the bottom of this tree, there was a marmot burrow hole.
Burrow hole in tree roots: ZeMarmot reference
We thought that was just too cool. Most burrow holes are just in the middle of the landmass, but this felt like a “special hole”. Our main character is not a special marmot, it’s not a hollywood leader, chief of the marmot clan or anything, but still… it’s our hero, right? It’s not just any marmot, its ZeMarmot! So we wanted to give him a special burrow. Therefore ZeMarmot now lives under a cool tree. Only difference is that we didn’t set it on a hill but in a plain, since plains are also very common setups for marmots in the alps.
Here is how the burrow entrance looks in our storyboard:
Storyboard: burrow entrance
Then with clean lines:
Drawing: burrow entrance
Finally adding some colors:
Colored ZeMarmot’s burrow entrance (WIP)
Note that this last image is still work-in-progress. Aryeom said she is not fully happy with it yet. I thought it was still nice to show you the progression from our research photos to storyboard sketchs, drawing and coloring, with all the thinking we made on why and what.
Hope you enjoyed this little insight in our work! 🙂
While production on the animation is still going full-steam, we thought we could show what exactly this is about. How do you go from static images to animated ones? Well this is all like progress layers, one step after another.
The Storyboard, then the Animatics
We have already talked about these at length so we won’t do it again. Feel free to check out our previous blog posts on the topic. These are the first 2 layers: comics-like static images (storyboard), and static images displayed in video (animatics).
Key Framing
In the digital world, “keyframes” is used with different meaning. On video formats, it is usually used to distinguish a standalone image in the stream with partial images which cannot be displayed by themselves. On 3D or vector animation software nowadays, it is usually used as extreme points in smooth transition which are computed by algorithm (interpolation). This is more or less the definition given by Wikipedia: “A key frame in animation and filmmaking is a drawing that defines the starting and ending points of any smooth transition.”
This definition is a little too “mechanic” and tied to modern way of animating with vector or 3D (actually it is not entirely true even in 3D and vector but this is what one might think when discovering interpolation magic). Key frames are actually simply “important images” as determined by the animator in a purely judgemental way. Keyframing is part of the art of the animator, more than a science. It is true that they are often starting/ending points of movements, but this is not a necessity. Also called sometimes “key poses”, these are what the animator feels make the movement good or not, in one’s guts as an artist.
Pose to Pose vs Straight Ahead animation
When animating, there are 2 main techniques. The first method is to decompose the movement in key poses (keyframes) as a first step. Then later, when it looks good, you complete with intermediate frames (inbetweens). This is the pose to pose method and demonstrated a bit in the above video.
When you are a big studio, keyframes would usually be drawn by the main animators, and the inbetweens would be left to the assistants (less experienced animators). This allows to share the work with more multitasking. In ZeMarmot‘s case unfortunately, Aryeom does everything, since we don’t have the funds to hire more artists as of yet.
The other method is called “Straight Ahead” and consists on doing all frames one after another without prior decomposition. Timing is much harder to plan with such a technique and you may end wasting more drawing. On the other hand, some animators prefer the freedom it gives and by making movements less perfect, you can also avoid them being too mechanical (in other words, perfect movement are not always what you are looking for when you want to represent living being in their whole perfect imperfection).
Observing Aryeom, she uses both methods, depending on the cuts, as is the case for many animators.
Conclusion
Hopefully you appreciate this insight on the work behind animating life, and this small video where we display the same pieces of a scene at different steps in the work-in-progress, first one after another, then side by side.
You will notice that we mostly show always pieces of the same scene since we really want to try and avoid any spoiler as much as possible. 🙂
This is spring, time of cherry blossoms and warmer weather (well for people in north hemiphere only!). So Aryeom drew a new header image for our blog (as usual drawn in GIMP under Creative Commons by-sa).
