Animation - Wave/Scorch preview by @chimerakitty (Chimera Kitty)

The link for the full video can be found here ----> ( https://youtu.be/rd4KW3bG65s ) I might also upload some other bits of the animation on here, idk.

This animation started as a little experiment, and i had not intended to finish the entire thing. Alas, here we are. I dont really do animation often. I dont consider myself to be very good at the medium. This is by far the largest animation project i have undertaken and completed, which to me is a bit of an accomplishment ( 40 whole seconds, sad how much work it takes to produce so little. ) 
Overall this was a wonderful learning experience. I had many pitfalls, many mistakes, had to redo multiple scenes due to a lack of planning, or a poor execution. ( The whole thing is a bit of a poor execution, but you know what i mean. ) So, I will quickly give some notes in reference to my overall experience, mostly for myself, so that if i ever bother to do something like this again, ill know what to improve, or what not to do.
            For starters, I overestimated my abilities. Forty seconds isnt a long time, not by any means. But i did almost all frame by frame animation on ones. The final project is 644 frames, almost all of them have a unique drawing on them. It was too much. There's a lot of movements that i truly could have cheated on, by repeating or scaling the frames, simple interpolations of still images etc. ( I somewhat did that for some of the backgrounds, but i think i could have saved a lot of time if i had done so more on the main animations. ) 
            Second, Opentoonz is a bastard program, and a lot of the quirks associated with it are so frustrating. Memory issues that dont allow frames to render properly without closing and reopening the program. God, the color pallete mechanics are just so horrible. After you get used to having to copy/paste colors over and over, its not so bad, but it single handedly almost made me give up on the animation. In the future, merging all lineart layers into a single one would save a lot of time and energy in the long run. And for the love of god, making sure all areas i need to fill are actually have closed linearts since OT doesn't seem to have an auto gap-close option on the fill bucket. 
            On animation on a technical level, I didn't do as bad as i expected. That being said, my expectations were pretty low. One of my biggest issues was with timing. A lot of the movements are very... weird. Like they just dont feel right, and no matter how many times I adjusted the timing charts, it just wouldn't work out. I guess for my first big animation, it isn't really my main concern, since I was fighting tooth and nail just to get anything done. But for next time, a much MUCH more clear storyboard is going to be necessary. There were multiple instances in which something was storyboarded, but I didnt really understand conceptually how long a motion or action should take, and so a lot of the scenes are a bit too fast with a bit too much happening. (It was synced to music, and so I had to squeeze things in to match the timings. ) It was just a mess. 
            For the backgrounds i had initially made them in blender, and ended up just redoing them entirely in OT. I would still like doing the backgrounds in blender, but preferably with some different shader choices to make the styles mix better. Same with the FX, which were also made in blender. 
            ( Im sure more stuff will come to me, but thats a good chunk of my issues. )

Now, just so that we're all on the same page. This is a quick little animation of my OC's Wave and Scorch, two gays in it to win it or something like that. I do have redesigns of them, both in a more generic furry style and in humanoid style. However, my nostalgia gets the best of me, and I always end up drawing them in the sonic OC style from which they were originally birthed. I cant help myself, it sparks joy for me. Besides stylistically, they have absolutely nothing to do with the sonic universe. Also, I know the order of operations in this animation doesnt really compute, it sort of looks like the implication is that the two gays go for a swim and one starts drowning. The story is actually that their first meeting was Wave saving Scorch from drowning, and becoming friends thereafter. 

Anyways thanks for coming to my TEDtalk, hopefully it wont be four more months before i post something else, but it honestly probably will be.

Oh yeah, the song is Psyche! By Say Anything. I love that band with all my heart and soul and hopefully it doesnt get dmca'd or taken down or whatever the hell youtube's up to these fine days. If it does, I'll find another way to post the full thing.