Thank you for your comments. I highly appreciate them
@nikboy21: If I sum it up it took me around a full month (5 days a week) to make the whole film. However I worked on it around three months because I had to make some freelance work next to it. The workflow video is a good idea. I'll keep that in mind for sometime in the future
The short answer about my workflow is like this:
1. Write the script. I can really recommend the book "how to write for animation" from Jeffrey Scott. Although it's not the newest one, there are some very good techniques and insights that helped me a lot.
2. Make a rough and fast storyboard unless you have the final story layed out completely. I also made a rough floor plan of the room.
3. Choose the music. It was very important in this case to find a music that has the right feel and rhythm to the story so I could cut the animatic according to it. And sometimes the music gave me more ideas about the characters expression in certain scenes. Audiojungle was a great resource.
4. Make an animatic. I made the animatic just with the storyboard frames and the music and didn't add further sounds at this point, so it had the feel of a silent film.
5. Create the characters. The main character already existed. With the rest I tend to sketch them out (also color sketches), but only so much that I can build them in Moho.
6. Rig the characters.
7. Animate scene by scene according to the animatic. Some scenes became shorter some longer when I made the final timing of the animation in Moho. In the animatic you would have to guess the timing anyway. But I made sure to stay to the rhythm of the music. The props I usually build when I got to the scenes where they were needed in.
8. Make backgrounds. I tried to use simple backgrounds and put them directly into the Moho scene. Or build the backgrounds in Moho then export them to Photoshop, give them the brushy feel and then put them back into Moho.
9. Compositing. Animate backgrounds and characters so they fit each other. Mostly for moving backgrounds like in the last scene.
10. Cut. For the cut I used Hitfilm Express. It's like Adobe Premiere, but completely free. I export the animation from Moho as image sequences and put them on top of the cut storyboard images from the Animatic.
11. Add the countdown of the fly. Once I have the final cut I know when each second of the flies countdown has to appear. So I revisit the animation files (again), add the countdown and then export them (again) and put them (again) into the cutting software.
12. Add sounds. Recorded them by myself or used them from my existing sound library. I use Audacity for recording and editing.
13. Add credits
14. Render
Hope that helps
@puzzles shum: Do you mean the countdown? All the texts you see in the film were made in Photoshop first and then imported to Moho as PNG files.
If you have more questions, please feel free to ask
and please let me know what you think. Did you like it? Do you have any suggestions about future shorts with this fly? Of course I have lots of other ideas that I'd like to turn into new animations, but I always like to know if there is something that pops up in your head immediately when you think of that character? Thank you