Change of State: Final Animation

After one whole month of work, my superhero animation is finished.

After producing the rough build of the animation, I worked on finalising the lines (that is to say, redrawing them as solid black lines) and adding colour and special effects. There were a lot of layers to navigate, and there were several instances in which I accidentally started drawing or colouring on the wrong layer. Those mistakes were relatively easy to fix, but the real difficulties came from the timing and the special effects.

I had a bit of trouble trying to get the timing right. I could not get past the fact that the final pose seemed to come too late. In the end, I cut two of the inbetween frames from the last little sequence of movement and the timing worked out just fine. The special effects were more complicated. I basically wanted to give the impression of bright, glowing light as the superhero transforms and then a bright flash as the transformation finishes.

I discovered the solution completely by accident. I had been wrestling with the glow filter for hours, trying to make it expand just big enough to make the transformation seem more impressive without the glow effect looking terrible. Eventually, I took a break from it to sort out the transition of the background, which fades to grey as the transformation starts, back to white. The combination of the expanding glow effect and the background fading from grey to white perfectly created the effect I had been trying to achieve all along. I think that this happy accident is one of the crowning glories of this animation.