Applied Animation: Colouring Frames and the Endless Battle Against Time

Colouring frames to me (if it's without shading) has always proven to be pretty much the easiest part of the animation process, but that doesn't mean it's any less time consuming than the other parts of production. I felt our animation needed to be fully coloured, I feel we all agreed on this. Although as time progressed it was looking more and more likely that we may not be able to complete all the clips planned out for us in the Animatic.

I blame myself for this because as director, it is my duty to ensure as a group we manage our time effectively and from the start I should have worked closer with the schedule to carefully plan out exactly how much time we would be allowed to work on one scene before we needed to move onto the next. But unfortunately I didn't really think that through and by doing something I often do, in that being too much of a perfectionist, I concentrated too much on making individual scenes look as professional whereas I should have been concentrating on the big picture, in making sure the whole animation is professional.

Anyway, looking back I feel we may have completed all the clips laid out for us in the Animatic if we left all the scenes black and white, but I felt to fit with Matt's very successful background designs that were often very well thought about in terms of colour tones that the upfront animation needed to be coloured to to bring up the quality of the whole animation.