Hello everyone, welcome to the second episode of how to animate a fight scene. Today we're going to be looking at specifically like the hand-to-hand stuff. We're going to put a few kicks in there different hand hits, a little bit of acrobatics throwing in there, why not? So firstly I want to say that if you want to watch the full extended tutorial which is going to have more content more tips on stuff like sound design, posing, composition hopefully, I'm gonna have that up on my website for free and the link is going to be in this video so Just head over there and you can watch the full version or you can just watch this and that is fine too. I'm probably going to put the source files for this up on my website as well so you can download them for free just by heading over there and then you can open this up in Flash and take a look.
Yeah, so right now what I have is about 10 keyframes so far. That's when I... was able to record it. Before that I had an error.
So what I did starting off was I decided to have a different approach from what I normally do. What I normally do is I animate continuously. I draw one frame out and then I draw the next frame, the next frame, the next frame in kind of time order. What I did here was, for the first part at least, with these very fast hits and blocks and dodges, I drew first all of the points of contact. And then I drew the rest of the points of contact.
So that would be like as his arm is outstretched in a kind of a punch and she's blocking it, like where they contact, draw that first. And then for the next hit, draw that again. But don't draw any of the movement in between, just the points of contact. And then afterwards, like go in, space out the frames and draw in kind of the poses in between, what I like to call the breakdowns. and that's where, imagine it being like powering up, so pose in between the actual hit itself.
And then from there you know you flesh that out, you space them out as well, and you do the ones in between them. So that's a different approach to what I normally do, and I actually found that it worked really well, especially on these fast-paced bits where there's a lot of hits being exchanged in very few frames. It allowed me to be kind of quite...
economic with my frames so that one hit and one block would only last like maybe four frames at the most so I can do them with higher speed. As well as that I also decided just for the sake of like time that I would keep all of the like both of the characters on the same layer so I don't know if I would recommend that because it did get a little bit messy at times you can't just erase. one character without erasing the other if they're in close contact like they are in this scene but it did mean that I didn't have to worry about changing layers a lot so I didn't have to select one layer when I'm working on one of them select the other layer because I drew them both at the same time so in each frame I would draw both poses from both at the same time and I prefer it that way, I think it's way better too to do that, I would recommend that. That meant that I didn't have to worry about the layers.
And then eventually I realised I should probably draw one in a different colour and that would allow me to select the colour of one of them and kind of let me move them around. Because I like to scale my characters accordingly. And then I think after this point I started animating continuous again.
So I would just go back to my normal habit of animating in time order. But they have a very similar result. It starts off, I think there's about five hits exchanged, and she dodges all of them.
And then she grapples him and like swings over. And I saw that in a Jackie Chan film. I can't, I don't know which one, but I have the reference. It's a little video that I found.
So I had that up on my second monitor and I was watching that. Just studying how he vaulted over his opponent. That gave me a lot of help for this part. Uh, what else?
So I'm working on Adobe Flash CC and I'm using a Wacom Cintiq 12WX. I am looking to transition to Toon Boom. I've been learning it in some spare time with my friends over Skype, but it's a pretty tricky transition.
I'm also learning Photoshop and I'm kind of testing the boundaries of Photoshop to see if I can make animation with it. I know it's not an animation software. But I really like the paintbrush textures I can get in Photoshop So I'm looking to see if I can use Photoshop in the future for animation So back to the animation here The character on the right currently is a woman But she's bald right now because I decided to draw in the hair afterwards Because it's kind of got the wavy effect and it kind of has... its own motion and so I find to do the hair it's way easier to like leave it until the end you just draw the skull you know and then add the hair on a different layer afterwards and the other character has this hood and that was easy enough to draw so I just drew that as I went along and he has this kind of tunic thing I don't know what it is it's like a robe of some kind but yeah the character designs weren't by me like This fight scene is part of a project that I'm working on in collaboration with Keep Walking on Newgrounds. So I'll link to him in the description.
This is like his project really, but I offered to help out just because I really admire his work and the stuff he makes. He's an amazing animator, so I kind of leapt at the opportunity to be able to help him out with this. And yeah, so hopefully there's going to be more scenes. from this project.
It's a great project. It's like really gives me a chance to test the boundaries of these acrobatic moves and not only that but effects animation. There's a lot gonna be a lot of explosions in there. Another thing that's kind of unique about this scene that I wanted to strive for is the fact that it's not got any jump cuts in it.
So the aim of this one is to see like to have quite a long shot. play out where you can see both of the characters fighting styles but without it having these unnecessary cuts between like the back and forth kind of thing that you have in a lot of western animations. Breakdown of film like Die Hard the action scenes in that they are very different to the eastern way of making fight scenes and that's generally because the actors in western films can't fight, they can't fight very well so they rely on the editor to kind of jump cut and it looks much more dramatic I guess but it's not really what I'm going for.
I want the audience to be able to see with less distortion kind of the animation itself, how the characters are behaving. So in this one the female character, she's not actually attacking the guy, like he's attacking her. She's being very defensive, only using blocks and dodges and an attempt at a grapple, which is quite kind of a peaceful method of detaining someone. On the other hand, he's being very aggressive, like very fast, very kind of, you know, lots of motion blurs, lots of kind of quick flurries. He's very Wing Chun inspired, despite the fact that Wing Chun is meant to be like a defensive.
Martial art style. The fact that you can fire off a lot of hits with Wing Chun very quickly means that it can be used as a very dynamic kind of aggressive fighting style if you want it to I guess. You'll see in the last part of this that he's using the chain punch technique, which I really I really love animating that is like a really it looks very cool I think I don't know what move this would be classed as, this kind of swinging acrobatic grapple.
It just looks really cool to me. So one thing people can struggle with with animating these scenes is the flow or the fluidity. Basically, when you're drawing a part of the human figure in motion, You have to look at the onion skin. The onion skin is like the ghost layer so it shows the frame behind it. I have that on like almost the whole time here.
So say you're drawing the arm and the hand. You have to look at the layer before it, the frame before it, and see where the hand has come from. And then you have to draw it with like kind of a drag motion. So if you're moving a hand and the leading energy is with the elbow, then the last part to...
move will be the fingertips. I don't know if that makes sense but that's the mindset that I have when animating something that has a lot of flow. With this particular part it led to a throw but then I decided later to take out the throw part because I thought I didn't think it worked as well and I wanted to continue the very close quarters combat thing of her like fighting him up close instead of her throwing him away.
That would kind of end the... it would diffuse the situation, but I wanted it to continue for longer. So what I did instead, which you can't see on this video, but you will be able to in the extended one, is I found a way for him to repel her grapple throw so that he doesn't get thrown away.
But that's going to be either in part two of this one or in the extended version, which will be on my website. Thank you very much for watching. I hope this helped a little bit.
I know I didn't... Managed to get into a lot of detail about how I constructed it But I will have to wait till next time if you want to see the next one Where I cover more about this I would invite you to subscribe do that if you want to see more of these I am Currently making a lot of these kind of videos which will walk you through the process so And also you can find out more about this on my websites. Goodbye