Animation Dailies and Review

I like animating, but unfortunately, you have to do a lot of tweaking after the broad strokes have been done. This is true for all forms of Traditional and Digitial animation while our Stop Motion friends, have to get it the first time.

Rough Key Poses

A lot of studios have "Dailies" at some point during the workday to check the progress of each animator's scene. Usually a small team will meet with the director or Supervising Animator, which could also be a one on one situation. Your job as Animator is to take notes on what the Director wants you to do. This is where you can ask questions or bring up any problems you are having with the scene.

For Animation Professors or Instructors, we need to review our student's work as if we were making a feature film or commercial. This will help students get use to the work flow and understand that every project has a "pipeline" throughout production.

Clean Up Final

 When reviewing animation, you need to find a way to look at individual frames in order to take out the bad key frames to add better poses. In the past, a supervising animator would flip through animation drawings to find the problem, but now we do it digitally.

Here are two free programs which allow you to upload your scene and send it to someone else to review it and add notes to your work. If you know of a better program, please let me know and I will add it to this post.

SyncSketch, https://syncsketch.com/  

Allows you to review notes during a real time session which is very helpful in online teaching situations. The free service allows 5 uploads a week and you get more features if you pay for them. It doesn't

RGB Notes, https://rgbnotes.com/features 

Allows you to upload a scene which you can open and make notes to and send back to the student. RGB has added the ability to add extra layers on top of the original animation, allowing you to send different versions of notes. You turn on all the layers or only the ones you need, this helps to see how the scene has been revised over time.

 

2 things I don't like about both softwares.

There is a lot of things I like about both of these software, here are only two things I'm wondering both companies might add to future versions.

1) There is no text tool option. All your notes have to be written with a mouse or stylus. 

2) Once you drew some notes on one frame, you cannot adjust the positioning or copy/paste the info to another frame. When making notes, you have to be as accurate as possible. This can be a bit embarrassing if you are watching this live and the notes keep changing.

Whoever animated the above clips, please let me know your name and I will be glad to give you credit in this blog.