Hey everyone, I was going through the Animation forums a few days ago and saw other people doing threads where they post WIPs and stuff so I thought I might as well do the same! I'm currently on the post-production side of things on my current animation projects right now, so I probably won't be posting many WIPs for a while so I decided to use this thread to also talk about and dissect my previous works as well as various miscellaneous animation stuff including demos and general practicing, basically just me rambling on about my process and sharing fun behind the scenes stuff! I hope you guys enjoy whatever this thread ends up being.

To get things started, let's talk about this sequence in one of my upcoming animations:

The character animation part of this is done in Flash 8, but the backgrounds are done in Blender. The background's 3D model is this 3D school model from TurboSquid, click on this hyperlinked text to access the original model. I made the 3D video of the background first by just moving the virtual camera around, then I took the video output and converted it to the FLV file format so that I could import it over to Flash 8 where I placed it on the timeline. I usually work with 12 fps so sometimes prior to converting the 3D background video to FLV, I take it over to Filmora and speed it up by 2 so that when it plays in Flash 8 at 12 fps it doesn't go too slow, but in this case, I actually animated this entire sequence on a separate .fla file from the rest of the animation so I didn't have to worry about any prior scenes getting messed up when I change fps.

Once the FLV video of the 3D background was in Flash, I began to draw rough animation of the character ontop of the video, this was the result:

(if Gif doesn't work, use this link: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/928567428370276393/1125576990884368434/froo.gif)

This was generally a decent result however there were various things that needed fixing. Since this was done in Flash 8, the tracking was manual, in this initial draft I did not do much of a good job when it came to tracking as I was mostly focused on getting the jumping correct. The 2D animation had to cater to match the already rendered 3D visuals, this resulted in my lingering on the pose of the character mid-air. The character is jumping off a building, it should have a sense of momentum, right? but this lingering on that frame instead created a sense of stillness which was not intentional. Additionally, the actual impact with the wall happens off frame which means the audience misses out part of the action which is not ideal. So after I reached this point, I went back and made changes to remedy these issues:

(if Gif doesn't work, use this link: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/928567428370276393/1125623978363461652/andydd.gif)

This third draft improves significantly on the previous draft, by removing unnecessary extra frames and poses, it's more straight-to-the-point and carries a better sense of momentum and action as the impact with the wall is now seen on screen. Part of the 3D video is cut to accommodate for the 2D action (the opposite of what was being done in the previous draft). With the part where he lands on the side of the wall, I wanted it to feel somewhat believable, it would not feel believable at all if he instantly reached a perfect pose upon impact, so I have him instead make a quick involuntary motion upon impact prior to correcting his stance, this helps create the sense that the environment is real and physically affects the characters that inhabit it.

Then finally, I finish up by fully adding the character design, removing the rough drawings. This sequence (or at least the 2D animated component of it) took roughly 5 hours from the first draft to the final draft. In the end, I'm mostly happy with how it turned out, of course it isn't perfect and I still have room to grow but I was able to accomplish everything I set out to achieve. However when it came to post-production I ran into a minor problem! While exporting to gif format keeps the trimming of the 3D background visuals, when you convert to swf and to mp4 (with the help of the wonderful Swivel!), Flash for some reason doesn't keep the trimming so the converted mp4 file had the 2d animation and 3d background out of sync! As a quick work-around I just screen recorded the sequence with OBS and put it into Filmora and cropped it to remove the Flash 8 UI. Not the perfect solution as I'm missing out on some of the original video quality this way, but it is what it is.

This particular sequence is for my next animation project which will be a 4 episode series here on Newgrounds, you can check out the trailer for it here:

If any of you animators out there are looking for some great 3D models to use for your own projects, I've put together a comprehensive list of every 3D model I've used for my project (Thank you TurboSquid for keeping track of all my downloads!): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fMtUaNa9D6enp_gRACW5dkQM8k1NsRD_hEFD69ZSutw/edit?usp=sharing

And that's about it for this first entry on this new thread! I'm not sure how often I'll use this thread but I want to make it a regular thing, I think maybe for next time or eventually at least, it would be fun to go through and dissect my animation from last month, titled "The Egg", I had a lot of fun making that one and I think it would be definitely interesting to talk about the various decisions made during the production of that animation as well as talking about the general process for that as well. Let me know what you guys think of this thread!

(Screenshot from "The Egg" Written by @SunSmog and @Joeyay)

Welcome, mate, and well done!

Great to see your progress and read about your process!

This is a nice format here, on the forum, started by a couple of guys who, sadly, haven't posted for a very long time.

THE EGG (Analysis - Part One)

Hey all, I'm here to talk about my animation, The Egg, an absurd short in which an evil egg destroys the universe so that he can hang out with his friend. Since Newgrounds posts do have character limits and I do have limited time, I'm going to be splitting this analysis up into multiple parts instead of doing everything in one go!

The first shot is quite simple, a flat 2D background with not much dynamic perspective going on. The background itself was very easy to make thanks the the line tool in Flash. I didn't plan out the art style or character designs, instead I just made them up while I was going along. The only thing that was planned out was the script which was based on a Discord conversation between me and @Joeyay, although of course some parts had to be shortened down or compressed, e.g. in the original conversation, Joeyay's defeat is more drawn out while in the short, Dr. Joay's defeat happens off screen and is instead used as a plot twist.

I decided to not give the characters arms and instead just disembodied hands, this way I could simplify the animation process as I did not intend to work on this short for too long. This choice also allowed for creative decisions such as the part where Joay's hand goes back behind him to close the door. Inspired by old fashioned cartoons such as Mickey Mouse, the hands are covered by gloves, or in this case, the hands almost appear to be the gloves themselves!

The door was only drawn once, with each frame I just altered the perspective on the original drawing by skewing / distorting it. I wanted the door opening to be gentle and smooth rather than something sudden and harsh as I wanted to establish a calm mood prior to the Egg's antics taking off. To accomplish this smoothness, I employed one of the fundemental principles of Animation: Slow in and Slow out.

(Image Source: https://animation2012.weebly.com/slow-in--slow-out.html)

This is basically just when the starts or / and ends of a motion have more frames dedicated to it than the middle, this helps create a sense of speed but the easing in and out helps build a sense of realism. Even in this cartoon world, paying attention to how real things move is important as otherwise the motion will appear wrong and strange. Even to those who aren't particularly artistically inclined, if something looks odd, chances are that people will notice.

If you pay close attention, you may also realise that I never actually show the door from a side view but instead it just flips from the front to the back, but this doesn't feel jarring, why? It's because our brains mentally fill in the gaps! It happens all the time in real life, for examples, check this article by the Scientific American.

The drawing of the door is 2D, so when skewed it will not show the parts of the door that were not visible already in the original image, to remedy the limitations of the 2D drawing, I went back and added a white rectange on top of the door drawing in order to have this sense of 3 dimensional space on what is actually a 2D door that has been skewed and distorted, this way the door doesn't look impossibly thin.

I wanted Dr. Joay's character to have some kind of recurring motion to avoid shots from feeling too still, I came up with the idea of just having his head hover up and down, since the head isn't connected to the body, I saw no issue with this. The head movements also follow the animation principle of slow in and slow out.

Speaking of animation principles, the principle of Secondary Action is also on display in the first shot. When Joay's legs move forward and begin the walk motion, the disembodied arms follow along as well as the head, when the motion begins the hands up and the head moves down before moving up again not long after. This builds a sense of weight to the movement as the components of the character do not feel as if they are just floating (even though in the most literal sense, they are) but instead connected to the moving body and being affected by it's motions. They don't move in perfect unisen which still suggests that each component is separate but they still operate as a combined whole. The movement of the hands here may also be considered an example of the animation principle of anticipation as the hands move up before the leg begins to pull the rest of the character forward.

(Illustration showing an example of Anticipation by Liz Staley: https://tips.clip-studio.com/en-us/articles/3409)

For the second shot I realised I could just edit the previous background and just skew it to look like it's from a different perspective. This is not a perfect solution but since the backgrounds were already simple line art and the shot only lasts for a moment, I decided this was something I could get away with. The real reason why I cut to this different perspective is simply to avoid having to fully animate the walk cycle, the unique perspective somewhat makes up for this shortcut as it still allows for the motion to be readable as well as visually interesting, even if we aren't seeing the full action. The walking in this shot is just simple up and down with some easing.

When we cut back to the previous perspective, the character has left the frame but the hand returns just to close the door, aside from this being a fun visual gag, the reason why it works is because of the timing of the action, Dr. Joay walks in but the hand doesn't go back until he has left the frame, this makes it easier on the audience to know what to focus on, if the actions happened simultaneously it would not work as it would be too busy to follow. But since it happens after, now what happens is that the audience will focus on Dr. Joay walking out, notice he didn't close the door, and then the hand comes back to correct that mistake.

I'm writing this in the morning and I have to go now, so I'll continue this analysis later when I have the time. Hope you guys are enjoying the thread so far!

Welcome to the animation forum! I always enjoy when these types of threads pop up. It was really interesting reading up on how you approached the 2D-3D hybrid scene, and the clever way you got around the cropping trouble in post-production.

Thank you for the kind words RobC3, I'm a big fan of your thread! It actually gave me the idea to do this thread!

THE EGG (Analysis - Part Two)

I decided to give the house a rope that turned on the lights rather than a lightswitch simply because it was less of a hassle to animate and looked more visually interesting. The other character's hands are not visible in the first shot in this gif, this was simply because I felt the inclusion of hands in that shot would make the frame look more awkward.

At the bottom of the screen, the credits are playing, however you can notice that there's white rectangles partially blocking the screen during the credits, this is because I accidentally deleted the first 28 seconds and the only remaining draft of that part of the animation had outdated credits with outdated usernames on them (e.g. it still had my old username "BluestoneTE" rather than my current username "SunSmog" so I had to come up with a "good enough" solution).

When the light turns on, it's not instantaneous, instead it grows until all the darkness is gone. This was done to further emphasize the light-hearted and whimsical tone of Dr. Joay's existence prior to the Egg's shenanigans.

The lip-syncing is done manually, without the aide of any audio to match it up with, I recorded all the audio during post-production so if you may notice that the mouth flaps don't perfectly match the audio. Since Dr. Joay's head moves up and down and I needed the mouth to move with it, I turned the head object into a Graphic symbol. A graphic symbol is an object in Flash where you can click on it and add any animations to it within the object's separate timeline, and then when you click out of it, the animations done inside the symbol carry over outwards and you can move the object around anywhere and the animation will continue, and once the animation is completed, it will just loop. Here's an example of a graphic symbol in Flash, this example is taken from the croissant army moment from later on in the animation.

and then outside the symbol:

After Joay says "what's up" to the other character, instead of cutting to the other character I instead made a transition that makes it look like the two shots are a continuous shot with the action lines being used as an additional catalyst for this. This use of transitions to make fake continuous shots is something I love to do in my animations, sometimes I do it in a way that doesn't even make it feel like a continuous shot, but just serves to add extra energy to the general scene. This use of transitions is something you'll see a lot of in my next animations as well!

When the other character says "loneliness", the background around him disappears and is replaced by white and then a gradually darkening gradient. This is because including the background would make the shot too busy and I wanted to focus more on the emotion of the character's face which is further emphasized by the gradient. A detailed background would have taken away from the intended effect.

When the other character says "We lied to you!", I wanted it to look overly dramatic, so I added black bars on the top and bottom to simulate the aspect ratio of a movie. I actually also accidentally lost this shot at some point so in post-production I downloaded a gif of the shot I already had and converted it to mp4 and used it as I liked the animation in the shot and didn't want to redo it. Surprisingly, this did not cause any issue, the fact that it's actually taken from a gif is not noticeable at all unless you notice how the gradient in the background looks mildly odd.

There's no cool transition to Joay's response, it's just a straight cut to convey the shock in this tragic betrayal.

The part where the other character asks "Where Are You" also has black bars, however I can't actually remember why I went with this, I think maybe I didn't like the way the shot looked so I wanted to just focus on the lips, and then to contrast the dramatic nature of the other character and the whimsical nature of Dr. Joay, when it cuts back to Joay, the black bars recede out of frame very abruptly, this was a comedy decision as I felt it would be funny to contrast the seriousness with the obliviousness of Dr. Joay.

The animation principle of "squash and stretch" is used when Joay looks around, squash and stretch is when an object's shape is exaggerated during periods of motion to bring life, flexibility and smoothness. It's a core staple of animation.

(Example of squash and stretch, image source: https://www.animationmentor.com/blog/squash-and-stretch-the-12-basic-principles-of-animation/)

Squash and stretch is often used for comedic moments in cartoons, here it's used to continue establishing the unserious happy-go-lucky whimsical nature of Joay, throughout the entire animation, squash and stretch is never applied to the other character, his motions are intentionally rigid to create a visual distinction from this character and Dr. Joay.

Here you'll notice that the lip flaps stop moving. Originally I wanted to have lips move for the entire animation since this art style is much simpler than my normal art style so I felt I didn't have to take the shortcut of not using lip movements this time, but at the time I was animating this part (July 2022) I was also trying hard to finish the season finale of Alchemist (my upcoming web series) so I decided to employ the same short cut here.

To make the dialogue more visually exciting, I ditched the normal background in shots where the egg says stuff like "NO MORE SUN?" so that I could have little graphics appear on screen showing the thing that he's talking about.

A hyper detailed frame of the clock is shown when Joay looks done at his glove, this is done as a visual gag as the clock is not visible in any other shot besides this moment. I was inspired by those parts in Spongebob where they randomly cut to detailed shots for comedic effect.

(Examples of what I'm talking about)

In the next shot of the other character talking, the mouth flaps are moving again. This is because of reused animation. I already had mouth movement frames so it wasn't much of a challenge to just re-arrange some of them to match this new shot.

Reused animation is the technique in which old animation is repurposed for something new instead of doing it from scratch. This is something you can see in a lot of old Disney movies. Reused animation is one of the ways in which animators can work smarter, not harder. This is especially important for me as I don't have infinite time since I still have to focus on school. People sometimes ask me IRL, "how do you have time to make all this stuff?" and the answer is simple. I don't, I just sort of brute force my way through it, I take any shortcuts I possibly can, anything to ensure that a final product will exist.

(Example of reused animation)

Another example of reused animation can be found in this awesome video put together by Eric LeValley where he compares various moments from the '60's Spider-Man cartoon in which animation is reused.

Here when Dr. Joay says he's not just a therapist but also a doctor, I had the doctor gear appear out of nowhere as a little visual gag, but right after I have the shot pan a bit and the background is replaced by these action lines (not really action lines but I'm not sure what to call them), these are added to build a sense of faux dramatic-ness and fanfare, especially when paired up with the text. Black bars are not used to sell this effect unlike with the Egg as Joay is supposed to be a more comedic character.

That's about it for this part as I'm running out of words! Cya next time!

Not part of the ongoing analysis but I thought I might as well share, here's a random thing I animated earlier today to kill some time.

I was animating this while I was still in class so this thing is very rushed, not particularly happy about the throwing animation but I think I did an alright job with some of the poses.

This is nice actually a good scene here very nice flow of animation too

~X~

Update to the previous thing

May or May not be cooking something up for the Live-Action Jam.

Finished animating it, gonna go and edit it now. Enjoy this random frame:

The video is almost done, I'll release it tomorrow.

Here's a fun sneak peek tho!

Finally done with that animation!

THE EGG (Analysis - Part Three)

This part right here was fun, but not for the reason you might think. This was another instance of me being economical with my resources, I needed a way for the Egg's monologue to be visually interesting, but I didn't want to spend too much time on animating something needlessly complicated so I had the idea of just reusing some of my illustrations as backgrounds and have them appear through panning shots to add an artificial sense of movement and flow in the sequence. The explosion animation here and the action lines are also reused assets, they're reused from my upcoming series, The Unyielding Alchemist which in production at the time of the Egg's production.

The explosion itself is taken from Episode 2 which hadn't been animated at the time this specific sequence was animated, so for a while there was a less well animated placeholder explosion, later on when I had that better explosion animation from Alchemist, I decided to put it in here to improve the sequence.

This was one of the most fun parts to animate, I hadn't planned out what this transformation would look like and instead made it up while I was animating it, I thought it would be cool to have the cartoony hands transform into freakishly long claws and to have the simple line eyes be replaced by one massive eye. Why is the Egg a cyclops? There's simply no reason other than "it looks cool" and honestly, that's the only reason I really need. To sort of accent the transformation, I added pink for the highlights on the Egg's dark form. Pink I think is a very versatile colour, I've used it a lot in my illustrations and I've found that it's really useful in creating some nice visuals. When the Egg transforms, the shading on him is significantly more detailed than it is on any of the other things in the animation, signaling that the character has reached a state beyond that of anything else around.

(Note: this shot is in the part of the video that was animated in 2023, not 2022)

The sketchy lines on the Egg's dark form was actually inspired by the Spot from Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. I had seen the film in theatres a month prior to animating this shot and I liked how the Spot had this whole construction line aesthetic. I felt it kind of built this sense of power, that the character is so immensely beyond our comprehension that he does not adhere to traditional senses of form or consistency, not to mention the volume that sketch lines tend to add to things. It is for these reasons that I chose to add these lines to the shot. It's also why the purple background on the shot does not stay still even though the character is still, to create a feeling of flowing energy and presence.

[Caption: The Spot provided inspiration for the visual design of the shot]

To continue this establishment of the Egg's new form and stature, in the next shot (as seen in the gif), the shadow is growing, but not just growing at a constant rate, it's growing, then slightly stopping, then growing again and so forth, this imperfect growth is done to make it seem like it's a living, breathing entity that is growing rather than just a shadow, it gives the character more perceived weight and also makes it more unsettling.

As the Egg grows, the camera upwards and away from Dr. Joay, making him seem smaller and smaller in comparison to the evil egg! but throughout the whole shot, he is still the focus, even as he gets smaller, this visual communicates to the audience that despite being overpowered, his will will not be deterred as he remains the centre of attention rather than being consumed by his irrelevance at the face of a cosmic entity such as a universe destroying egg!

And then we have this fun magical girl transformation sequence for the character, pink is still used as an accenting colour, but through this transformation, the character's design still remains mostly the same, showing that he is not deceptive, unlike the Egg whose form changes completely upon his transformation. This conveys how they are two sides of the same coin, Dr. Joay is truth and the Egg is deception.

Once the sword exits frame in the transformation sequence, it actually cuts to another piece of reused animation! In this case, I reused the entirety of a previous animation called Sworded

Sworded was a short animation test I had made not too long before production on the Egg began, the original conversation that this animation was based off did not feature the use of such a sword but I wanted an excuse to reuse this nice piece of animation so I put it in anyways. And I think it paid off, even thought the character design isn't entirely consistent between the sworded sequence and the rest of the animation (the character having arms and a neck unlike the rest of the video), It still flows well and the transition is seemless. If you were unaware of Sworded as a separate entity, you would probably not even realise that this is taken from something else.

The shot with the sword applies the same idea as the 2D door being manipulated to have seemingly 3D motions from earlier on in the animation, it's one singular drawing but through the wonders of the transform tool in Flash, it can be turned into multiple keyframes providing an illusion of spin.

That's about it for today's analysis, we'll continue on with this next time and hopefully finish this multi-part analysis soon so that I can talk about some other animation stuff on here.

Finished up that test animation, decided to post it:

THE EGG (Analysis - Part Four)

This short sequence was added last minute, i animated it during post-production because I was re-reading the conversation the animation was based off and I realised I had forgotten to include the croissant army so I just shoved it in there.

To abridge the fight a bit, I had it cut to a video-game-style vs. screen before having the Egg defeat Dr. Joay off-screen. The background on the shot of the bedroom has posters containing references to Alchemist, Hot Pink Blues and Animo which are all other projects of mine.

In the part where the character opens the door and sees the universe has been destroyed, I wanted it to feel like a void but still be visually interesting and appealing, so the compromise was to make it a constantly oscillating cascade of colorus and sqiggles with everything centering around the remnants of the house. Not only does this create the impression that the house is the last remaining thing in the universe but it makes the outside of the house seem impossible to interact with. However, in the sequel of course, Dr. Joay escapes the confines of the universe and faces the consequences.

Speaking of the sequel, in The Egg 2, I was able to use a version of the opening shots of the original Egg without the credits. Originally I wasn't sure what I was going to do about the credits, I tried to just zoom in the footage to have the credits be off-screen since it wouldn't make sense for credits to appear at that part of the video but it just looked wrong and too claustrophobic, but then I remembered that I sent a gif to someone of the first few shots of the animation back when I started working on it back in 2022 so I searched using Discord search, found the old message and the downloaded the gif and converted it to mp4 and I used it!

Then I integrated the old footage with the new animated segments by having the old footage cut mid-way through the transition and then go to the new animation where I replicated the transition so that it's seamless, as if I still had the original animation file and just modified it instead of what I actually did.

At the very end of the animation, we finally see the Egg's actual "egg form", I was originally going to have him go to that other form with the long fingers but felt that it was important for the Egg to actually look like an Egg.

And that's about it! This has been my analysis of the Egg, next time I'll just go through random miscellaneous shots I've worked on and stuff like that.

Thank you for reading this multi-part analysis, check out the full Egg saga if you haven't already

Decided to improve a shot from my next animation, the two-part series premiere of Alchemist.

This was the shot prior to the improvement:

and this is the shot after the improvement:

I felt like the shot was missing a little impact so I added shading to really give it that "wow" factor. Hope you guys like it!

the rocket boots in this episode are powered by Liquid Hydrogen and Oxygen so it wouldn't really look like this irl (it would be more transparent) but here in the world of animation we can suspend our disbelief for the sake of aesthetics!

[Caption - example of what hydrogen thrust actually looks like, taken from a test of an RS-25 rocket engine]

Also improved a different shot:

shading can really go a long way in making something look good! This frame is part of a piece of reused animation from a different episode so it looked a bit awkward in this new context as in it's initial context it only appeared for a short time on screen before it went to a different frame while here it's kept for longer as there's dialogue, so to distract from the flaws of this reused frame, shading gets the job done (hopefully).

Here's the same frame but in it's original context:

progress is good on all episodes, decided to add in an extra shot to episode 2 since I felt it made sense given the context of the moment.

when the green-screen is replaced, you get:

I'm hoping to get all episodes done soon so that I can release the series premiere during September as mentioned in the trailer.

thought it'd be cool to share, here are some impact frames from Episode 2 of Alchemist.

status update on the show: editing is complete on every episode, voice-recording has not been completed yet. Releasing within September might be tricky, I'll let you guys know if I decide to delay or not.

Update: Alchemist will now release in October instead of September as tragically I cannot rush through voice acting without destroying my lungs. This is also my 20th post on this thread so I might as well share something as well!

Here's a fun little gif I put together comparing a shot of Alchemist from Episode 1 with a shot of Alchemist's secret identity: Matthew Bohr in Episode 3! Since these were the same character and I needed a similar shot, I just redrew Matt ontop of Alchemist. The wonders of animation reuse!

new animation just dropped!

Since my exams are over, I am free to work on Alchemist so if all goes to plan, I'll be able to release the first 2 episodes before the end of the month. The abundance of free time has also allowed me to resolve issues that were previously present as I'm no longer in a rush and have the ability to take my time.

I'm also planning on potentially starting work on a new animation right after post-production is complete on Alchemist. Whether or not I follow through on it depends on whether or not I experience burnout once I'm done with Alchemist. For the next animation, I'm considering modifying my workflow. I want to try new things and improve my work.

This may include:

- adding new programs to the workflow

- changing the order of tasks in production (e.g. moving voice-work to before production rather than doing it during post-production, allowing for lip syncing to be implemented)

- adding new tasks that aren't currently part of my process

I've also been doing some animation practice as of late to "get back in the groove" and experiment, I've done multiple but I can only put 2 on this Newgrounds forum posts so here's two recent ones from yesterday and earlier today:

also here's this animation test I've done specifically to test out an idea I had for that next animation

I finally finished the first three episodes of my web series "The Unyielding Alchemist" so check it out if you haven't already! and tell me what you think about it as well in the reviews section!

Once I have enough free time, I'll be going over each shot in this massive 40 minute monster of a video and describing the behind the scenes processes that make stuff like this possible. So stay tuned for that!

Well done! And congrats on the frontpage, it's well deserved! I'm gonna try and watch it all soon.

here's a quick test I did to see what alchemist could look like with a thinner line thickness and colour! I think I've figured out how to make this costume not look bad in colour lol (that was one of the reasons why Season 1 is in black and white, the other reason being to save time), so if I ever get around to making more seasons, I might add colour.

The idea I had here with this palette and the way certain parts are shaded stems from me recently watching Iron Man: The Animated Series which had this really good colouring style in season 2. I think the Alchemist costume looks weird when it's in bright and saturated colours, but with this more muted look with more interesting colouring choices (e.g. using turquoise for the metal parts of Alchemist's suit rather than grey) help make the look work. And I also tried to avoid the way how digital shading can sometimes look kind of bland (when not composited well of course), by making the shaded parts more saturated. This is done within Flash as I don't know how to use After Effects.

War Machine's blue-looking suit was what gave me the idea to use non-grey colours for metal. And the way that certain parts are shaded with black at 100% opacity also gave me the idea on how to deal with the blue part of Alchemist's suit.

The background I used for this quick animation test is this public domain image I found.

The animation I used in this test is taken from Episode 4 "Mechs n' Wrecks!" which will be released in a few months from now, I haven't decided a proper release date yet but it should be sometime around or after July. It's too late to add colour to the episodes I have already so season 1's style will remain in black and white.

A bit of an update on the upcoming episodes of Alchemist!

https://sunsmog.newgrounds.com/news/post/1439669

TL;DR, next new episode drops in August, in the mean time, between May and July, I'll be re-releasing each of the 3 episodes from the series premiere (as separate videos unlike the 40-minute video that has them all edited together), this should make the show more accessible!

The update also has a sneak peek of the next episode so do check it out!

I've resumed work on episode 4, titled "Mechs n' Wrecks!", on June 17th, me and @sailorgouda, the main writer / storyboard artist for the episode as well as another member of our team, had a meeting in which we discussed some potential rewrites. This lead to a rewrite of the opening scene by me and Sailorgouda in order to make it more efficient, more effective and also more entertaining! The original opening scene was written by me but after rewatching the latest draft of the episode, I felt it wasn't very effective at it's job and didn't communicate enough information, with this new version of the scene, we establish more things by showing, not just telling, allowing us to also trim out some exposition.

I've also suggested adding a B plot to the episode so that we can make better use of the side characters but we haven't decided if this will actually be implemented or if we'll avoid adding it in order to avoid inflating the runtime. We will see how that goes!

On June 18th, Sailorgouda began storyboarding the new rewritten scene, here is a sneak peek at his work! this part shows a group of characters high-fiving

That last panel over there is supposed to be an alien news anchor, his appearance is not described in the script but while drawing the boards, he had the idea of making it a squid-like creature with a mustache and small glasses.

Speaking of aliens, in the new scene we also have this peculiar lookin' parasite alien, here's the design as seen in this concept art I drew during the June 17 meeting while we came up with the script:

I have yet to start animating the new scene but will begin soon-ish, maybe once the storyboards are all done.

Recently I've begun the animating phase for the new opening scene. Here's some screenshots:

For this new scene I've switched over to a newer version of flash (Animate 2023) so that I can get used to it and use some of the newer features in future animations. So far I'm using the caligraphy brush for the new scene rather than using the pencil tool like I usually do for these cartoons. Why the change? I'm experimenting with a new possible art style for some of my future animations, and also because I think the alien monster in image 2 looks better when drawn with the calligraphy brush. Hopefully the difference of style between scenes doesn't come across as too jarring as a similar clash of styles does also happen in Episode 5 (the episode right after this one), in that episode there were parts that were animated in early-ish 2022 that predate the current art style so in that episode you may witness a similar discrepancy in style.

Do you think it's a good idea to get experimental with art style for a singular scene? Or should I retain the normal style for consistency's sake?