Animation Process (Jackie Jackpot Preview) (Patreon)

Here's a preview of sorts for the next page of Jackie Jackpot (Green Room Gratitude). I want to give you a process insight and a sort of conundrum. I rough out the overall animation with a sketch that I can follow with finished line work and color. It bloats the process because I end up with an enormous number of layers by the time I'm done. Another issue is that the frame rate is often choppy because of how tedious animation can be. I can use an app to interpolate in-between frames and the results are always a mixed bag. Often times sections need entire reworks because of how the interpolation is processed. It handles limited palettes well and corrections are easy. But with color/shading/highlights it can sometimes ruin whole areas trying to smooth something that's not intended to be smoothed. If I can figure out a way to speed the process and maintain a higher frame rate without losing the feel of a hand drawn animation I'd be happy but it's tough trying to solve a problem I'm creating.

Possible work flow alterations that may resolve it could be to do the line work in a lower frame rate and then color the frames after interpolation. Alternatively, linework and flats could get me half way there and then shadows and highlights after interpolation to avoid smearing.

IF anyone has a proven solution to this from experience I'd love to hear it. Otherwise I'm going to keep at it and refine the process as I go. With any luck I can get into a rhythm of putting out quality animated comic pages without spending all of my time obsessing over details.