Hello everyone
I am an animation student trying to get a small bit of pixel art animation done but I am not succeeding, I need help.
I will skip the long introductions, already this is going to be a pretty dry first post but thankyou for reading. Okay let me explain my problem and see if any of you pixel artists can help me.
I am trying to put together a short film in an 8bit style, Ideally I want to put the film together using a combination of flash and after effects. This is because I have used them both quite extensively and am used to all the pros and cons of the systems. I am open to the idea of trying out another program for some animation but ideally want to stay with the adobe suite.
Now the here is where my problems come in. I used to do alot of pixel art when I was much younger but slowly could find less and less time for it until it eventually fizzled out. When I used to do it I used MSpaint really zoomed in so that I could draw characters 10-20 pixels high. When starting this project that was the look I wanted to capture but when I tried to bring my little characters to animate they unsurprisingly were smaller than my cursor and when enlarged lost the crisp 'im made of lots of little boxes' look and went all rounded and blurry. Not what I was after. My conclusion was I needed to draw in higher res but all of my attempts have failed. The first of which was trying just a big square tool, maybe 20x20 pixels but drawing with it was a nightmare as I had to try and precisely line up every 'pixel' I placed. The next idea was to make a snap to grid but it failed aswell.
My only success I have had was drawing in MSpaint then screendumping the super zoomed in image into Photoshop and cleaning it up ready for animation. This method slows me down a little but is kind of manageable but it feels very very crude.
In the end I want to be able to have some dramatic camera shots and be able to have the option to zoom in on a characters eyes and have just a few giant pixels on the screen with no softening or distortion.
I was hoping you artists might have tried this kind of thing before and have a cunning solution.
