Animation Workflow

I’m constantly evolving my animation and filmmaking workflow to incorporate new apps that streamline or simplify things. I want to show how I’m using Obsidian, Callipeg and Blender.

Obsidian

Workflow Map

I’ve always been on the lookout for an app that would work as centralized organizational hub for an animated film project, and I think I have finally found it in Obsidian. Its mainly a markdown based note-taking app, but now with things like Canvas and Bases (its version of smart spreadsheets), it can help me sort and make visual sense of a HUGE amount of different kinds of content. I can just dump everything into it and either visually sort it or link things together in various ways. I am also able to do all the writing for the project here. Its great! And free!

Canvas View inside Obsidian

My current project’s Obsidian Canvas. This is mostly just reference material, but I’m also starting to add concept art that I’ve drawn to the Canvas as well.

All of the images and videos I’ve collected for reference live in a subfolder inside the Obsidian folder structure so its nice and organized. Its not buried inside some arcane folder on the cloud somewhere like it would be in most other apps. Its just all on my hard drive the old-fashioned way. This has become more and more important to me as tech companies and the things they build are so fickle. I want regular standard files that I can hopefully open forever anywhere I want (as much as this is possible anyway).

Callipeg for Storyboards

I’m currently using an iPad 2D animation app called Callipeg for making storyboards, and its really going well. I’m just drawing a frame at a time on the timeline and saving the actual pacing/timing for the video editing phase. That keeps things simple.

Callipeg Screenshot

A screenshot of my Callipeg window.

The drawing brushes aren’t the best, but they are good enough for basic stuff. Actually you could argue that having basic brushes for drawing rough and fast is a positive thing as it keeps you from getting distracted with fiddling around with brush settings.

It has good tools for making a quick selection and scaling/rotating/moving just that chunk, which I find indispensable. I have not used it super far into production yet when you are scrapping and rethinking tons of things and your file(s) gets insanely complicated. I have a rough plan for keeping the file flexible as the project expands and changes, but we’ll have to see how it does. I think one key thing is not worrying about giving shots official numbering/naming of any kind until the dust has mostly settled.

For this project so far Im just exporting a png sequence of the frames and bringing them into the video editor.

Blender for Video Editing?

Any chance I have to exit the Adobe ecosystem is refreshing, so after seeing that Blender can be used as a video editor, I thought I’d give it a shot with pretty low expectations. I clicked with it pretty quickly though, and the more Im using it the more I like it!

Blender Screenshot

It works pretty much as you’d expect but with that special Blender weirdness on top. You have to stay in the Video Editing view for it to work (I think?) and then you just drag images (the pngs from Callipeg in my case) or footage into the timeline and extend/shorten/splice to your little hearts content. One really nice thing it can do on export is bake in metadata. So things like timecode/frame number etc are just watermarked right onto your export automatically.

The tricky thing for me is to keep using the same tools until the end of a project. My last short film I think I used like 10 different apps for storyboarding! That got really messy by the end as you can probably imagine. I’d like to avoid that situation this time around and restrain myself from trying out every bright new shiny tool I find.