How to increase animation speed?

[FlyingNinjaBannanas]

I know I'm going to get a lot of obvious answers to this, How do you decrease the time it takes to create quality animation? Is it just experience? Or is there a more hidden method?

Sorry about the thread title. I couldn't think of one that sounded good.

[Jomillex]

Hmm tweening?
But i hate tweening.
Yeah its mostly experience though i can't think of anything else :/

[FlyingNinjaBannanas]

At 6/8/11 09:21 PM, Jomillex wrote: Hmm tweening?
But i hate tweening.
Yeah its mostly experience though i can't think of anything else :/

I know about tweening. I use it for non FBF things (sun, camera, balls, etc) But I was just wondering if there was anything else.
BTW Thanks for replying.

[Jomillex]

Well.. you could skip rough drafting and storyboarding but the results may suffer. If you want fast good quality animation then team up with several other artists

[FlyingNinjaBannanas]

At 6/8/11 09:41 PM, Jomillex wrote: Well.. you could skip rough drafting and storyboarding but the results may suffer. If you want fast good quality animation then team up with several other artists

I get what you mean. And I don't want to lose quality. So I guess I'll just keep working and improve with time. Thanks.

I'm not leaving this thread to die though. So if anyone thinks of anything else, post.

[Neo-Egyptian]

If you're talking about a very brief cartoon or a one-joke short, then things like tweens, rough drawing and 'straight ahead' animation (where you don't go from pose to pose and don't bother planning inbetweens) will help speed things up. Equally, if you're not too bothered about amazing quality, you can use repeated library clips for, say, the heads of characters (then just animate the eyes, mouth and so on on different layers), and for stuff like lip-sync you can either use a looped graphic of a mouth opening and closing, or you can use a few basic mouth shapes rather than doing it all frame-by-frame. There's lots of stuff you can do to save time on simple animation!

But...

For 'real' animation, so as in for stuff where you're doing keys and poses and proper inbetweens and so on, the only things that'll help speed animating up are skill, talent and experience. The thing is, so often I'll try and find shortcuts or ways to make less work for myself while animating, but the unfortunate truth is that animating is nothing but work! If you're actually planning to make a 'proper' cartoon, things that may seem tedious and time-consuming at first - like planning out the script, getting your keys looking great, doing a basic animatic for the whole thing - will ultimately save time as they prevent errors from happening later on and give you a great framework to build upon when finishing your cartoon and fixing any problems with it.

Equally, having a really good understanding of drawing - specifically perspective and anatomy - will again make things quicker later on as you'll be spending less time focusing on the actual drawing and more time on getting your characters to 'act' and move as you want them too. I know this is a rather basic and time-consuming requirement, but so often people want to rush in and get things done when actually having a good understanding of all the boring basic stuff will help with the fancy complicated stuff!

[FlyingNinjaBannanas]

At 6/9/11 05:38 AM, Neo-Egyptian wrote:

;
Thank you for the post. I know I'd get some obvious answers but this took the obvious and made it easier to understand.