The Animation Mega Thread: wait, so the drawings move?

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > The Animation Mega Thread: wait, so the drawings move?

NC Wyeth Death Cult: Dec 30, 2005; He lost his life in Chadds Ford, he was dancing with a train.

Pet peeve time:
One thing I am always going to suggest to a lot of people starting out is to spend a little more time with sound design. A pop filter is your friend when recording dialogue. To hear how bad sound design and recording can adversely affect a project, listen to a few Foamy the Squirrels. The last syllables of almost any of his dialogue makes that annoying crackle that is easy to get rid of.

Here's my question:
What is your usual workflow? How do you break down such a monumental task? Right now I am starting on my first coherent short (about seven minutes) and while I am starting to put together my storyboard I've started working on backgrounds and sound design (I have several people who need to read for me and I eventually have to deal with someone doing composition). I just feel like I am all over the place. Should I just pull back and really work the hell out of the storyboad? What's the best way to manage a project?

# ¿ Sep 30, 2009 00:12

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 20:46

NC Wyeth Death Cult: Dec 30, 2005; He lost his life in Chadds Ford, he was dancing with a train.

9nine posted:

Absolutely work on your storyboard first and foremost...

Thanks, I knew I was getting ahead of myself.

Uncle Jenkins posted:

Might as well plug my 2D final film, Hamsterman. Everything but one voice done by me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOfiGYffKAU

I have to say that last April I went to see a film festival and that was much better than any of the animated shorts I saw. Really decent timing and direction. The closing credits were pretty creative, too.

Matty D posted:

Honestly, I would just make it shorter. 7 minutes is a tooooooonnnn of work...

Not that it's impossible. Just sometimes less is more.

I kind of agree. It's very dialogue driven though with three parts that are really physical so I think that a lot of it's going to be not as difficult (but still pretty hard to do). I am trying to approach it by breaking it down into chunks. I might scrap it and go with something easier. I consider it a learning process though even if I learn that I shouldn't try anything longer than a few minutes.

# ¿ Sep 30, 2009 04:47

NC Wyeth Death Cult: Dec 30, 2005; He lost his life in Chadds Ford, he was dancing with a train.

I just saw this:
http://theblackheartgang.com/2007/12/18/the-making-of-the-tale-of-how-2007/

The Blackheart Gang put a "making of the Tale of How" on their website. They do a breakdown of two scenes and it turns out that each one has over 300 layers and they go in depth into the creation of the look and feel of the piece.

If you haven't seen it yet, watch it:
http://theblackheartgang.com/the-household/the-tale-of-how/

It was done by three people in their spare time over nine months. I wish I had such dedication and focus.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2009 17:27

NC Wyeth Death Cult: Dec 30, 2005; He lost his life in Chadds Ford, he was dancing with a train.

Vaporware posted:

That's really great.

I'm curious how many flash based effects they use and if they took any steps to make the flash render without skipping frames. I saw some blending masks and some alpha in the clouds, which are processor intensive, but not deadly. Most of the actual animation appears to be timeline based. It looks like flash wasn't the final format so they don't have to worry about syncing the sound in flash. Eh, nevermind, unless they were compiling the final presentation on a netbook it wouldn't be an issue. Really good work by them, especially since they were doing it in their spare time.

I don't think that any Flash effects were used in it. I think that the number of layers of textures they use would have blown Flash's compiler up.

In the "how to" video, they said they only used video compositing tools like After Effects and a 3D program for most of the actual animation. The images themselves were pen and ink, scanned in and colored in photoshop.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2009 14:34

NC Wyeth Death Cult: Dec 30, 2005; He lost his life in Chadds Ford, he was dancing with a train.

On the whole, I really like ToonBoom studio. It's pretty easy to use, despite a monster manual, and it handles my small projects pretty well. Tech support isn't all that good. Anything I've fixed has been stuff I had to dig into the program and figure out. I still don't know why I can't drag and drop things into my library.

I think it's funny that the guy from Bitey's Castle is sponsored by them and promotes the program on his site but anytime he does a video of him at work it's almost always him working in Flash CS4.

es to es posted:

Steer clear from Animate and Animate Pro, they include(d) such bugs as not saving.

Hah, it looks like they are putting all their muscle into Animate Pro, too. I've been holding off and now I think I'll hold off indefinitely.

I think that they have made a huge leap in solving stability issues from 3 to 4 in Studio. For instance, whenever I put things on my other monitor, it doesn't crash. Also, my program doesn't automatically reset itself to use the minimum system requirements every couple weeks.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2010 14:32

NC Wyeth Death Cult: Dec 30, 2005; He lost his life in Chadds Ford, he was dancing with a train.

spicybackpain posted:

I'm working on a new series for my website and would like some feedback on it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWnxYslYoL8

I won't go into too much detail just yet - I want to see what your initial reaction to this first episode is, and if everyone comes across as it should.

Thanks for your time!

I really like the episode because it's an inaction story about a guy trying to get action and the whole premise seems to be promising.

Your opening moves really slow and seems to take longer than the episode itself. I'd dramatically speed up the parts where they are flying and generally make a way to tell the backstory a little quicker.

Also add some echo or experiment with different room reverb for the announcer's voice to give it a booming quality. It sounds kind of flat.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2010 22:15

NC Wyeth Death Cult: Dec 30, 2005; He lost his life in Chadds Ford, he was dancing with a train.

spicybackpain posted:

Thanks for the feedback! The beginning does run a bit slow - I'm thinking of speeding up the blueprint sequence and cutting out the flying segment altogether, and making things run a bit tighter.

The announcer does sound a bit flat - I'll use my limited knowledge of sound to see if I can punch it up a bit.

I think that you should build it up to have a more heroic, action-oriented feel to contrast the episode's inaction itself.

The Powerpuff girls' opening had a decent rhythm that started slow and sped up after the origin story:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8HdpBXLVYk

and Bakshi's Mighty Mouse used a lot of fast cuts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYpBoYa4pno

I don't know what sound program you are using, but Audacity is decent for editing stuff for the web. Here is a list of the effect menu for you to play around in:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/manual-1.2/menu_effects.html

# ¿ Apr 19, 2010 16:31

NC Wyeth Death Cult: Dec 30, 2005; He lost his life in Chadds Ford, he was dancing with a train.

Nate Breakman posted:

I'm gonna keep this thread alive if it kills me! Here's a daily doodle a couple days in the making.

I like this and I like the limited palette, but I think the lighting you got going on is more of like the sudden glare of a gunshot (if it was sped up) and not a cigarette, which would show only the area around the nose and shadows.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2011 00:40

NC Wyeth Death Cult: Dec 30, 2005; He lost his life in Chadds Ford, he was dancing with a train.

felat posted:

http://vimeo.com/21822525

Project a buddy and me did for a class on cutout animation. Inspired by russian folklore.

Did the animation in Maya.

I liked it! The opening and waves remind me a lot of The Tale of How by the Blackheart Gang and I really liked the little sea shanty backgrounds in the beginning.

Do you mind if I ask how hard it is to learn how to use Maya to do 2D things like this?

# ¿ Apr 5, 2011 01:02

NC Wyeth Death Cult: Dec 30, 2005; He lost his life in Chadds Ford, he was dancing with a train.

felat posted:

What is a sea shanty? English is not my first language and I'm not familiar with the term.

The huts on sticks with the porthole windows.

Nate Breakman posted:

I don't know if this isn't animation-specific for this thread, but where do you guys get your sound effects? I haven't really had a terrible need to get a bunch together since my student film, but now I need a bunch again. I used to just google around and pull stuff off seedy web sites, I'd like to be a bit more professional this time.

I've used this site quite a bit: http://www.soundrangers.com/

# ¿ Apr 6, 2011 02:42

NC Wyeth Death Cult: Dec 30, 2005; He lost his life in Chadds Ford, he was dancing with a train.

You could also just use a custom brush in Flash to make a one/whatever-sized pixel block. Then just do everything there with the bonus of having an actual onion skin function and layers in graphics to work with.
(Difficulty: must have any version of Flash)

# ¿ Jun 16, 2011 02:26

NC Wyeth Death Cult: Dec 30, 2005; He lost his life in Chadds Ford, he was dancing with a train.

I want to do a ton of background studies, are there any "go to" sites that have screen shot dumps of entire animated shows and movies? A while back I was able to find one that had a lot of early Disney and it was an amazing learning tool.

Alternately: any suggestions for taking media I own and turning it into en masse screen shots?

NC Wyeth Death Cult fucked around with this message at 15:23 on Aug 27, 2018

# ¿ Aug 27, 2018 15:20

NC Wyeth Death Cult: Dec 30, 2005; He lost his life in Chadds Ford, he was dancing with a train.

Neon Noodle posted:

greetings, I made a short:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp702yBpZu8

I really liked this and I wish most people put this kind of effort into essay/shorts like this. if you don't mind one piece of criticism, I feel like the hand drawn stuff popped in the beginning/middle but the lack of it in the second half unbalances the feel. Adding the screaming kid running through one of the caption interstices would pull it together. Subscribed and looking forward to more stuff! Thank you for sharing.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2021 17:28

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 20:46

NC Wyeth Death Cult: Dec 30, 2005; He lost his life in Chadds Ford, he was dancing with a train.

Hi everyone- I am getting back into animation after a brief hiatus to get my life in order. When I last did anything it was using Toonboom Animate and Flash. I am wondering about workflow- I was thinking about breaking my storyboards into shots, animating them in whatever Flash is called now and importing for assembly into After Affects. There is no dialogue so it should be as straight forward as it could be. Sound good?

# ¿ Apr 19, 2022 15:10

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > The Animation Mega Thread: wait, so the drawings move?