Ask the Artist: fraggledragon
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Ask the Artist: fraggledragon |
| Interviewer: | |
| Interviewee: | fraggledragon |
| Date(s): | May 4, 2010 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | Fan Art, Supernatural |
| External Links: | interview is here, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
fraggledragon was interviewed in 2010 for Supernatural Roundtable.
Some Excerpts
I am self taught in both the drawing and animation, so the way I do things are probably more time consuming than the way others do it. But this is the way I taught myself, and the only way I know.To start with, I make the story outline and create the storyboard of it in my note book. From the story board I break it down into parts and how they are to look and decide on the speech for the story, and work from there.
I make sketches then paint them in Photoshop. The end pictures have layers that I can animate, (lips, eyes etc) and can have up to twenty or more layers, depending on what is to move in the picture. I save all the small movements individually as frames in jpeg files.
The frames are then put into Animation Shop Pro where they are animated, which is where I add blackouts, fadeouts, shaky cam etc. Animation Shop uses a lot of memory, so I need to break the animation down into three files. I then splice them together in another program, then import it into After Effects to add the speech bubbles and any other tweaks that need made. (Like the car headlights in part one.)
Then it is just a matter of throwing it through Virtual dub to add the music and the final render is complete for upload.
It is the drawings and making of frames that take the longest time. Sometimes the drawings/frames take up to a day each to finish (when I get time to work on them), and that is where I get impatient! But I pushed my impatience to the side for part two, and took my time for a better result. Once the drawings are all done, the process only takes a day or to for adding speech, music and final render.
Before animating, part one had over 1400 frames, part two had closer to 2400 frames and I can see part three having more again. When we see the Butchers room from Sam's perspective in part two, that was 294 frames alone, made from one photoshop drawing.
My Sam drawings always bugged me, so I did not really work on him much in the first part as I felt I just could not get him right. Dean was never great either, but Sam bugged me the most. But a comment on the original video on youtube, said that Sam does not have a 5 o'clock shadow, and that's when I kicked myself. It made me look closer at Jared Padalecki's face, and notice that he is more red and pink with no shadow, so worked on better drawings of him.
So hopefully, thanks to that one comment, Sam is looking better for part two. I definitely put more work into the original drawings for part two, reason being, I had no idea that people would like the animation so much, and I felt that they should get a better quality!
Someone commented that it is like watching a moving fanfic, and I suppose that is exactly what it is, an animated fanfic. I love to read and write angsty things, so I quite liked this analogy.