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Animation projects sharing thread.
As mentioned in another thread, a dedicated animation sharing thread could be a good idea. I said I'd upload an animation I worked on last year, but I've not done any video editing on this macbook yet, so I'll work out how to do that first.
Meanwhile, here is a short animation from 2003 that went round the net a few times and was downloaded so much it pretty much killed off my website at the time. As I try to do with a lot of my art, this combines "live action" with animation. It took about 18 hours of work, but that included me actually making it once, not being happy, and going back and re-animating the entire thing. Enjoy:
Meanwhile, here is a short animation from 2003 that went round the net a few times and was downloaded so much it pretty much killed off my website at the time. As I try to do with a lot of my art, this combines "live action" with animation. It took about 18 hours of work, but that included me actually making it once, not being happy, and going back and re-animating the entire thing. Enjoy:
Comments
That would be mind-boggling.
What you have there is very cool though.
Also, lackofcheese, that's an awesome idea, seconded.
My idea was to continually juggle two balls and one "large white round object with a handle of my own design". The video would the project different objects moving up and down, and I would juggle at the same time and it would look like I'm juggling that object along with the two balls. The idea was to make a "dangerous" juggling routine with no danger. I'd start off juggling a bowling pin, then a knife, then a fire torch, then a baby, then a ming vase, then the middle east peace process, then a stink bomb... you get the idea. I didn't make it though as I had other projects to work on. And that I thought it would be a bitch to have to juggle exactly in time with the video.
However, this year I got a Wii and thought instead of me having to time myself perfectly with the video, I could work out a way to make the animation track me in a "Hi, I'm Johnny Lee" kind of way. I downloaded some free software and played about with it and I'm sure this concept could work. But I came up against a real barrier: I have no coding skills and know of no way to bring my vision about. I'm just not that kind of geek. Saying that, maybe there is someone here who would find this kind of thing easy. If so, I'd be willing to bung a few hundred dollars someone's way if they want to help out.
When I was fifteen or sixteen I also made some random gifs involving stickfigures skateboarding but I would have to dig through a few CDs to find them again. Not really worth it.
Sora
Shuriken (with the kanji for "death" on it =P)
Bowser
If you get decent, you start moving on to bigger sprites:
And eventually animations and sprites from scratch. Most sprites are made using another sprite as a base and changing poses in limbs, etc. pixel by pixel. It's an extremely tedious process, and my advice is that no one over the age of 14 should spend time making sprites unless they are making a video game or are actually artistic. The Sora one uses frames ripped directly from the ROM. This is more typically how things are done. Here's an unfinished example of a sprite from scratch.
I took stuff and put it with other stuff. Vague, but if you check this out, you'll see what I mean. I took a normal dragon and when it transforms, I made it change into an old dragon. I had to do a lot of recoloring in the transition slides, which was a major PIA.
I made a few semi-custom animations...
This was of a Jaffar edit: All in all, it's got a few custom drawn sprites. I think it's pretty good, but I *just* noticed a major flaw- he attacks on higher ground than where he starts, yet on FE sprites, they should all be on level ground.
This was a phantom (er, whatever the summoner summons) edit, to be more phantom-like: Not bad, but it wasn't hard, either.
"Splicing" 2 sheets together: This was of Ephraim, but with a Hero's shield added in. This came out great. I didn't have to actually do a whole lot other than find out what pieces should go where, but I think I did a good job in doing at least that much.
Here's my album for everything else: http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v708/stevo123/sprites/
The album contains my animations, still sprites, and the slide-by-slide sheets that I used when I copy/pasted stuff into the animation program I used (Babarosa, works damn well and wasn't spyware ridden, actually. I say "wasn't" because I haven't used it in years).
As you get to the later pages (only 6, so it's not THAT much), the quality gets shittier, because those are my first sprite-edits ever.
Another animation question, this one for the traditional animators: Any tips for staying on model? Animators obviously have to be great at this. Comic book artists often just cop out by drawing the same face on everyone (Jim Lee, I'm looking at you). I really try to give my characters distinctive faces, but it's hard to keep them consistent.
As for the recoloring. Yes, at first it was pixel by pixel, but later I found a little MSpaint trick to let you change all of one color into another color. Say you have a basic shade of red on the screen and you want to change it to blue. Left click the red with the dropper, then (from the color palette) select blue with a right click. Then take the eraser tool, then hold the right button and drag over the red. It should all change to blue, and nothing other than the selected shade of red should be changing colors if you're doing it properly.
With that method, some recolors took 5-15 minutes, tops vs. an hour the pixel-by-pixel method.
All told, yes, everything (including the animations) took a hell of a lot of time to make, nothing was even close to 18 hours. The dragon may have been 5-10 hours...but certainly not 18. Seconded.
Here is a link to some animation work that I have done.
http://sycar.cgsociety.org/gallery/
And a higher res version here.
http://finalphoenix.com/demoreel2008.5lowres.mp4
As for staying on model. It's a really hard thing to do, and I'm not the best at it but you have to have a good tight design sheet.
Look at these design sheet's for batman :
Hand theories( I use what I learned from this hand theory sheet in most of my hand drawings).
Arm thoeries
Head theories
If you solve all your questions before hand it will be easier for you to do your animation. I totally didn't do that for the Scrym animation.
Woo, thanks, those are great. Bruce Timm is amazing. His stuff is so stylized that I don't know that much of it applies directly to what I do, but I can see how much thought they put into everything. Have you seen this site?