Which is your most difficult part in animation?

Artwork Animations
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Tell us your most difficult part(s) in animation.
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Love the idea . . .

Honestly, I don’t know if an answer to that question exists. You have to decide what you want to do – how much, or how little. You have to decide where you are willing to compromise. You have to decide what’s “good enough.” You have to decide how much time (and money) you have. And, finally, when it is time to “FISISI = F&kkit, Shrink-Wrap It and Ship It.” :slight_smile:

You’re creating things and solving problems all along the way. But, if you can develop a clear idea of “where you are going,” and then manage the actual process of “getting there,” you can work Magic.

Project Management, even for yourself, is an easily-overlooked piece. You mustn’t be “a ‘pantser,’” who’s trying to do everything by the seat of their pants. There is much merit to: “Plan the Work, then Work the Plan.” (If you simply “tangent off into the next problem when you stumble into it,” you will never find your way out of the woods.)

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For me it has to be the block-in phase, where you decide what the main beats, poses and timings are. On top of a good block-in it’s relatively easy to figure out the details and end up with a good shot. But a shoddy block-in… you’re setting yourself up for a difficult time, and you might have to start over (at least for the problematic parts, not necessarily the entire shot).

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I do something else. Since “I couldn’t draw an ‘animatic’ if my life depended on it,” I use the renderer from the earliest stages. But, I defer absolutely every future consideration that I can, until I have worked-out what the final movie is going to be. I shoot “lots of potential shots,” then go right away to a video editor.

Then, I circle back, incrementally, to begin to work out the details. A correctly-sized “bounding box” is a perfectly-good stand-in for a prop … and the set requires no decoration (yet) if it is correctly proportioned. “Workbench” will produce a correct render. Human imagination does the rest.

@Hadriscus: Your “block-in” idea definitely applies here. The “initial animation” doesn’t have to be final – that’s just another “deferred detail.” Just hit the major points, on time. But it is very important for me to be able to at least glimpse “the movie” as early as possible, while working within my limitations. There’s no point in fretting over “little-picture decisions” when there are still “big-picture decisions” yet to be made.

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