Storyboards > Animatics > Lip Sync > Rough Animation > Clean-Up Animation > Ink & Paint > Compositing

Rough Animation - Diamonds in the Rough
 

Animators do rough drawings first and test them for movement before they do the final cleaned-up drawings. These drawings can be basic stick figures, simple shapes with volume or something that actually looks like the character. But right now it's more important to get the position right than to have a perfect drawing. And it's more important to get the images into the computer quickly than it is to get the best possible image quality. Shooting your roughs into FlipBook with a web cam or video camera is the fastest way to capture your roughs.

FlipBook has several features that make camera capture faster and easier. The images are are captured directly in a traditional exposure sheet with thumbnails and you can make the paper transparent so you can see through lots of layers.

If you animate "straight ahead", doing each drawing in sequence, you can set FlipBook to automatically hold each drawing for one, two or three frames as needed. But when your animation has to fit in a certain time frame you'll probably do the key frames first. Since your key frames won't all be held for the same number of frames FlipBook lets you capture them and set their timing by pressing a number key on your keyboard. When the key frames are timed out and play correctly then you can go back and fill in the in-betweens or move on to the clean-ups.

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