Short Progress

A Word About Sound

2011-10-09T03:54:00.000-07:00

Hi All,
The question of adding music came up on the Anime Studio Forum so I thought I'd briefly describe how I do it here.

In editing software I compile all the storyboard images to create an animatic. I also sometimes roughly animate the images in Anime Studio to give an idea of the action. After the dialogue tracks are added I often add music and effects to get a feel for how things are progressing. For the music I use Magix Music Maker. Magix has an excellent range of samples available but you can, of course, use any instrument samples. You can also use your MIDI keyboard for creating melodies and chords if you wish as within Music Maker is a full orchestra of authentic sounds available. Luckily Music Maker has a video window so I can load the animatic and build up a music track to match the visuals where I think music is required.

This is an early version of part of the animatic that I've added music to. I've since changed it a little to make it a bit more dramatic after a colleague made a few suggestions.

For dialogue I have each character recorded separately. I then load the track into an audio editor and select and save each line. This makes things much easier when animating as each line can be loaded into Anime Studio for Lip Synch. I give each character a track in the video editing software also.

That's it for now. Until next time....

The Making of All Talk

2011-09-17T13:22:00.000-07:00

Hi All,

This time I confess the post is nothing to do with the making of my short film being created in Anime Studio Pro. However, I thought you may find it of interest. In 1997 a friend, Victor Georgiev, and I created an animated film for Central TV as part of their 'First Cut' scheme. It was made entirely on Amiga A1200 computers. At the time I kept a sort of diary on the making of the film and wrote it up as an AmigaGuide for Amiga users. Recently I found the disc with this on and I managed to get it onto my PC, which was a bit tricky so I apologise if there are any mistakes and continuity is a bit out. The AmigaGuide was a hypertext document and didn't run linearly.
I warn you, it's rather long but it does give an insight into the making of the film and what we learned along the way.
Anyway, here it is.....

Making Of All Talk

In no way could I describe our 5 minute animated film 'All Talk' as a major landmark in the history of movie making. However, it was made using the machine that we all cherish so I thought other Amiga users may find some background information on the making of our (very) minor epic useful.

This guide takes the form of a sort of diary, though I didn't think it necessary to go into as much detail as giving dates and times.

How did it all start

I have been creating animations ( some really awful ones! ) since I was about 10 years old using Super 8 film. Later I used the 16mm format and created a couple of short films, animation for BBC's 'Hartbeat', the titles to BBC's MovieGame and a few other bits and bobs. It was about 5 years ago when I first learned of the Amiga computer and my working methods were to change drastically.

I was working freelance as an animator at the time and was employed at the studio of a good friend of mine, Gavin Prime. Although mostly involved in the production of stop motion animation using puppets, Gavin did produce the odd cel animation from time to time. He had heard that the Amiga was being used as a very efficient 'line tester' with a piece of software called 'Take 2' and a little box that connected a video camera to the computer called a digitiser. All this could be purchased very reasonably. As professional line test systems at that time cost in
the region of £20,000 or so the Amiga seemed an absolute bargain!

Gavin purchased an Amiga A1200, a Rombo digitiser and Take 2. Most of my lunch breaks were spent reading through the Take 2 manual, the A1200 guide and any Amiga magazines I could get hold of.

The A1200 proved invaluable, not only for line testing drawn animation but also as a reliable 'video assist' system with the Amiga connected to a video camera mounted next to the film camera. Great! We could now animate the puppets and see exactly how the animation was progressing immediately!

It wasn't long before I realised that there was more to the Amiga than just a line test / video assist unit. As I read the magazines and learned more about the computer I became very excited at the prospect of being able to create animation, colour it and view it straight away. I soon had my own A1200 Desktop Dynamite Pack and was hooked.

Although I don't think anything looks as good as an image created on film, the advantages of being able to create animation and store it in the computer before downloading to video are many. No negative costs, processing, cutting print, release print, neg cutting, etc etc...
Anyway, the differences between film and video aren't so noticeable with animation.

Victor Georgiev arrived in England from Bulgaria in 1995 to try and further his animation career and began work at Gavin Primes. Victor became a total Amiga addict too when he saw some puppet animation digitised into the machine. A couple of weeks later he bought one! Not long afterwards he succeeded in making me really jealous by fitting his machine with a Blizzard 060 accelerator card. We began putting some ideas together for animated films that we could create using the Amiga.

A Beginning

In May 1997 I recieved an information pack from the Central England Screen Commission notifying me of the 1997 First Cut Scheme. First Cut, a scheme financed and run by the Screen Commission, West Midlands Arts, Central TV and a few others, had been in operation for a few years. It enables new directors to make a short film with a guaranteed broadcast slot in the Midlands via Central.

Victor Georgiev and I put together three idea's and submitted them with a showreel of Amiga and film animations. The first idea was a sort of animated talk show. The second was 'Mad Frogs From Outer Space', a strange homage to the monster B Movies of the 50's and the third, the one we most wanted to do, was called 'Krai'. I even went as far as creating a full animatic on the Amiga for 'Krai' in the hope of persuading the commissioning board to choose this film!

In early June we were asked to go to a meeting at Central TV where we had to 'pitch' our idea's and try and convince them that we could produce an original and high quality film in the time given. The film had to be delivered by the end of September.

There were seven films being commissioned in all but ours was the only one containing animation. Victor and I had attended a couple of these meetings before and, as in previous times, didn't really expect the projects to be taken any further.

Before I even arrived home from the meeting Lindsey, my wife, had taken a telephone call informing that we had been granted the commission and could begin work on our film immediately. There was one stipulation however, they liked all three idea's and wanted us to link them in some way. The film had to last EXACTLY 5 minutes! If it was any longer there was a chance that commercials would cut it off!!

We had to come up with a new script fast to link the idea's together in a convincing way.

As three scripts were first submitted to the Screen Commission, 'All Talk', 'Krai' and 'Mad Frogs From Outer Space', it seemed a formidable task to try and link the three in some way so that they didn't appear to be three completely seperate films. I was getting a little nervous now as here we were without a final script. All the other films were 'Live Action' and they would, presumably, all be starting to shoot their productions. With our film we had to draw the whole thing, and we didn't even know exactly mwhat our story was!

Eventually I hit upon the idea of changing the talk show script 'All Talk' so that the subject of the talk show was how the public were influenced by films and TV. This way the other two idea's 'Krai' and 'Mad Frogs' could be shown as examples of films that were a bad influence. Victor agreed that, though it would be tight getting it all into 5 minutes, it worked. So,we set about rewriting the script.

The Soundtrack

The music track for All Talk was being composed by David Stowell. David is a professional musician, composer and orchestra conductor and has composed music for feature films and BBC radio. He showed interest in composing music for our film after seeing the script. He took notes on the music style we wanted as well as rough timings. However, he couldn't record the final piece until he had a copy of the finished visuals to time his music to.

Voices

The main concern with soundtracks for animated films is finding actors that are capable of creating voices to suit the characters that you have imagined in your head. It may be that the actors interpretation of a character when reading the script is completely different to how you imagined it yourself.

We decided to use just two actors for the voices - one to perform all the female and one all the male. For the male voices I already had Ian Fairbairn in mind. Ian has done work for me before on other projects so I know the amazing range of voices he has. Once a very busy character actor Ian is now semi retired. He has appeared in Dr.Who, The Avengers, The Professionals, Timeslip etc. Does anybody else remember Timeslip?

For the female voices we decided upon Josie Lawrence. I managed to find out who her agents were through the Screen Commission and faxed a copy of the script. I recieved a reply saying Josie thought it was great and would love to do it but was busy with other projects for two weeks. As we really had to get the voice track done right away we couldn't afford to wait the two weeks and had to find someone else.

Ellie Darvill was recommended to us. I immediately called her and she demonstrated several American accents and lots of different characters over the phone. Brilliant! Ellie has appeared in Brookside as well as playing various characters on radio. Maybe her greatest claim to fame is as the voice of the WHY bird on BBC's Playdays. Luckily Ellies husband, Nigel, is a musician (keyboards with Fine Young Cannibals ) and had his own recording studio so we could record the voice track there. I arranged for Ian Fairbairn to come up to Bournville in Birmingham from London and we all met at the Darvill recording studio.

While Nigel set up the equipment Ian and Ellie rehearsed the script over a cup of coffee and performed it brilliantly. I remember hoping they would be able to do it as well when it was being recorded.

The DAT recorder started running and Victor and I followed the script as Ian and Ellie performed the characters in the sound booth next door. It was done just like a radio play in one take and without any mistakes at all! Nigel just cut it together a little tighter by shortening gaps between lines here and there. Atlast we had our soundtrack and could now get down to animating. Well, almost. First we had to take the DAT track to Waterside Sound Studios in the centre of Birmingham to be transferred to 16mm magnetic film.

16mm magnetic film is exactly the same as 16mm film except that it is totally covered in magnetic oxide like normal recording tape. It even has the sprocket holes ( one per frame ) down the side. This means that, when recorded, 16mm mag can be run over a soundhead and the sound on each frame actually marked on the surface of the tape. These markings are simply transferred to the Exposure Sheets and the animator now knows exactly how many frames a sound covers and what sound is on what frame.

Unfortunately, when we listened to the actors recording of the soundtrack we found that it was much too long. Nearly twice as long as it should have been infact! I had roughly timed myself reading through the script but the actors had obviously performed it at a much slower pace. This meant more time taken up as I spent days editing the soundtrack to last 5 minutes exactly. Worse still, it meant that some of my favourite lines of dialogue had to be cut just so we could keep the flow of the story.

Now we had the soundtrack we could start on the Storyboards.

The Storyboard

The storyboard was drawn very roughly as we HAD to get the animation done and there wasn't time to spend days drawing finely detailed images. As long as we could see all the shots and check that the continuity was okay then that was fine. We used A4 paper divided into 6 for storyboards and pinned these to the noteboard, in the small room I use as a studio, for reference.

Because of all the dialogue in All Talk it was far more important to spend time getting the Exposure Sheets filled in correctly than have beautiful storyboards.

Animation

Once we had the storyboard completed I began animating using the exposure sheets as a guide for the dialogue. Victor had already started animating the Krai section whilst I was reading the track and filling out the exposure sheets.

I had animated the title sequence for the 'Mad Frogs' section of the film and, with the help of Lindsey, shot all the live action footage of me 'acting' ready to be placed over drawn backgrounds and composited with animation. I like this technique of mixing live action and animation and used it before in a Low Res PD animation of me being eaten by a giant bee called 'The Adventures Of Eddie'.

The first shot I animated from the talk show section was the close up of Kristel where she first speaks and says "Good evening, the question we ask tonight is....". I decided to animate this shot
to reasure myself that the Amiga was going to be able to play back the animation at the required speed to keep in synch with the track. I handed the rough animation to Victor for him to 'clean up' in black pencil while I sampled the whole All Talk track, a line at a time, into the Amiga using TechnoSound Turbo II.

Nick Veitch and Vicki from Amiga Format were at my house to interview Victor and me about the film for the magazine, and see the Amiga Set Up we were using,when Victor arrived with a digitised version of the first shot on a floppy disk. Everyone watched as I loaded the anim from the floppy into AnimatED and loaded the sample to come in on the first frame kristels mouth moved. I set the frame rate and prayed before hitting Play. It was a great relief when Kristel moved and spoke in perfect synch! It's moments like this when all the hard work seems worthwhile. Although only a black and white test, this character was moving and talking.

Ofcourse, this didn't mean that the colour animation would run in synch but I needn't have worried as a couple of days later Victor had finished colouring the shot and it synched up just fine. I tried to keep the colour palette of the animation down to 32 and converted all the 24 bit scans to 32 colours which worked okay, with care.

The next part of the process was to place Kristel over a background of the TV audience. Victor had drawn 4 seperate images of the background so that we could 'boil' them if needed. The animation, being in that aforementioned sketchy style, resulted in the image 'wobbling' from frame to frame and we thought it a good idea to have the background move in a similar way. Not everyone likes the shimmering or 'Roobarb effect' as it has come to be known by those of us old enough to remember the adventures of the green dog. However, for a short film like ours it can be quite effective. Besides, we were under pressure to make the film as original in style as we could and we both wanted to make the film appear as far away from what is normally thought of as computer animation as possible. It's doubtful many people would realise a computer had been used in production at all. I did do a test with a static background but, to us anyway, it just didn't look right. It would have saved us a LOT of time if we'd had a single static background because Brilliance would have saved the BG to all the animation in one go. As it was I had to load in the first BG pic and merge it, on every 4th frame of the animation, behind the foreground image. I then had to load in the second BG pic and merge this, starting from frame 2, on every 4th frame and so on!!

By the way, as I appeared in the 'Mad Frogs' section, as the Live Action character, Victor decided that he would appear in the film too and placed a caricature of himself in the audience. On the opening shot he is on the right hand side - the character with long hair and a beard! Nick Veitch is also in the audience somewhere but I can't remember on which shot now.

It soon became apparent that just under three months really wasn't long enough for us to complete the film in the style we had chosen to create it in. We ran into several problems and found that as the deadline drew closer we were nowhere near finishing. I have never worked so hard in my life and both Victor and I found ourselves having to work several days and nights none stop to try and finish the thing.

Problems

Where to start! One problem we hadn't accounted for was the length of time it takes a picture to scan. Four minutes doesn't sound a great deal of time to scan a colour drawing but when there are 100 drawings to scan that's a long time! If we had done the film in the style I normally adopt of just creating outline drawings on paper and scanning these for colouring in Brilliance or DPaint then we would have had no trouble. Black and white images scan really fast but these colour images had to be scanned at 24 bit which took ages!

Having to add four background images to every shot just to give the whole scene a 'shimmer' also slowed us down greatly. We must have been crazy to adopt this style!

In addition, apart from these production problems brought on by our own initial decisions about the style of the film, other things beyond our control seemed intent on slowing us down....
Victors car packed in and I had to travel to Victors ( about a 50 minute round trip ) every two days to deliver and collect drawings. One of our two dogs mysteriously became seriously ill and died of poisoning. Obviously, Lindsey was distraught and I wasn't feeling over the moon myself by this time. The following weekend my Great Uncle was taken ill and died three days later! I was beginning to wonder if we were ever going to finish the film.

All we could do was get as much done as possible and hopefully make a film out of the footage that we had. There was no way we could get the deadline extended as things had been booked in advance and the broadcast date was already set! We were absolutely drained when time came to do the editing.

Editing

We didn't have all the shots completed but the editing time had been booked and we HAD to be there! Besides, Jim Tetlow had been booked to dubb the soundtrack the following day so we had no choice! Part of 'the Lady and her husband in the audience shot' needed the background adding and the 'Mad Frogs' section wasn't compiled at all!

Before the film could be edited I had to get all of the animation off the Amiga and onto videotape somehow. I took the Amiga and all my Zip cartridges containing the animation to Media Forge in Wolverhampton. Mike Turner connected the Amiga, via the composite output, to a Beta SP broadcast video machine. We did try connecting using a genlock and the video/monitor port of the Amiga but we got better results without. The animation was downloaded a shot at a time by simply double clicking on the MainActor anim icons. The sampled soundtrack was also recorded
as a guide for sound dubbing later.

Armed with the Beta SP tape with all the bits on I raced over to meet Victor at BBC Pebble Mill where the editing was to take place. Jonathan Birkett was waiting for us as we walked into the video editing suite. Firstly we needed a title sequence made up using the stills that Victor had drawn. Jonathan took the stills from our master video and manipulated them in an effects generator to create a nice typical talk show title sequence. It was only when I looked at the video later that I noticed that the stills appear transparent in places which is a shame.

We edited the film together but it became evident that without the missing shots we weren't going to have much of a film! Jonathan very kindly stated that if we left blank spaces in the video where the shots should be, we could drop the shots into place the next morning. This meant finishing the missing shots overnight and returning to Pebble Mill early the next day! We did a VHS copy, with 'timecode', of the film so far so that David Stowell could work out the timings of his music before recording it to DAT tape.

Victor came home with me and did some drawings for 'Mad Frogs' while I added backgrounds to the 'Lady In Audience' shots. David Stowell arrived at 7 oclock to pick up the VHS copy and was to deliver the DAT tape to me at the BBC the next morning. At 8 0clock David telephoned to say there was no timecode on the VHS tape after all!! We decided that he would still come to Pebble Mill in the morning, pick up a new VHS, go home and readjust his music to the timings then deliver the DAT directly to Jim Tetlow for dubbing to the film!

Victor had to go about midnight so I carried on compiling the animations. Because each frame of the animation was very different to the previous one they would take ages to save so I took the opportunity to have a rest on the floor while this was taking place.

I finished the 'Mad Frogs' section ( nothing like the version scripted but atleast I'd done something! ) at 8.30 in the morning and shoved the Amiga and zip cartridges into a bag and raced down the M6 to be at Pebble Mill for 9 oclock! Jonathan connected the Amiga to a Beta machine and we downloaded the new shots before dropping them into the blank spaces on the video. David Stowell was waiting in the foyer and a VHS timecoded copy was handed to him as I went past on my way to Jim Tetlows, in Kings Heath Birmingham, for the sound dubbing.

Sound Dubbing

The whole of the upper floor of Jim Tetlows home is a sound studio. Jim is responsible for dubbing the sound on all of the 'Spitting Image' series so is very experienced at creating a soundtrack for films where no sound could be recorded live...like animation.

He loaded the Beta video and the original DAT voice track and began dropping in the bits of the voice track from the DAT tape to replace the rough sound samples that existed on the film at the moment. It was amazing to watch him cutting the track on his computer system.

I think I may have fallen asleep at some point because I remember Jim telling me I should get home and he would carry on with the dubbing. I left after telling him that David Stowell would be over at some point with the music track.

To make matters worse, when I arrived home I found that our telephone was out of order so I couldn't call Victor and let him know how the day had gone. I rested and then later walked to a phone box to call David to find out if he had delivered the music okay. He had. I called Victor then went home to bed.

A few days later Victor and I visited the screen commission to sign some paperwork, expecting to be chastised severely for delivering the film late. Instead we were greeted by Pat Roberts who said that Victor and I were hero's! Apparently Central loved the film and even Michael forte, head of Childrens TV there had been called in to view it. Victor and I were taken into a room to see the finished item. I must admit I had been feeling a bit despondent after all the hassles and problems but Jim Tetlow had done a brilliant job with the sound. The film didn't look too bad at all. Okay, so it wasn't exactly the film we had hoped it would be but we finished it,just about, and
Central and The Screen Commission liked it!

Maybe the Premiere Night that Central had organised to show all the films commissioned wouldn't be so bad after all.

Premiere

Central had organised a Premiere Night to take place in a Media Complex in Nottingham. All of the commissioned films were to be shown. Everyone involved in our film wanted to be there. Ian
was coming from London, Ellie and Nigel Darvill, David Stowell, Jim Tetlow and Victors Mother and my Wife Lindsey. There was a large buffet before the screenings which calmed our nerves a
little.

Soon we were all in the cinema in an apprehensive state. Someone from Central TV introduced the screening and talked about all the films. I was pleased that they even mentioned the Amiga had been used in the making of the animated film.

However, I wasn't so pleased when the first film came on screen! It seemed obvious to me that the video projector hadn't been set up correctly. The whites were VERY washed out, infact all of the colours looked strange. When our film came on, because the drawing was on white paper, it looked even more washed out than the other films! Victor and I couldn't believe it!! I have a friend who has a cinema at home and uses a video projector to show laser discs and the image is stunning so I knew this wasn't right.

I found out afterwards that the video projector had arrived late and not been checked! The disappointment was huge as this was the first time that many people involved in the production had seen the film.

Luckily, another evening was organised in Birmingham to screen the films to the press. This time the projection was superb and everthing went well, I'm relieved to say. Many people came up to us and said the film was impressive and had we really done it on the Amiga? I took great pleasure in explaining that we had indeed.

Even with all the problems we had encountered I wouldn't have missed the experience. The summer had gone - I had been in our back garden twice in the whole of it - and I had hardly seen any sun at all. Lindsey had been amazingly patient and understanding. We had fully intended going away for a week during the summer and she had even booked her leave but it was obvious we wouldn't have finished the film and she cancelled it. She booked it again for a later date believing that we MUST have finished by then! We hadn't. She took her leave anyway and stayed at home. I think I have some making up to do!!

'All Talk' was broadcast on 30th October 1997, shown at the Birmingham Film and Television Festival.

Thanks

There are many people that gave a lot of help and advice during the making of All Talk. I just wanted to put it in writing here that their assistance was greatly appreciated....

Pat Roberts, Mike Richardson, Jasmin Quansah and all at the Central England Screen Commission for believing in us in the first place.

Central Television, especially Karen Davies, for giving us the opportunity of getting our film made and seen.

Ian, Ellie and Nigel for doing a brilliant job with the soundtrack.

David Stowell for composing some excellent music in such a short space of time and under tremendous pressure. Sorry Dave!

Jim Tetlow for working wonders with the track and really bringing the film to life.

Marco Vigelius and Markus Moenig, not only for their superb animation software, without which we probably couldn't have made the film, but also for quickly answering any questions and offering an enormous amount of help.

Nick Veitch, Ben Vost and all at Amiga Format for their help, advice and genuine enthusiasm for the AMIGA.
I would also like to thank the AMIGA community for comments, interest and encouragement and All those companies that still support the AMIGA.

Last but definitely not least I must thank my wife,Lindsey, who had to put up with a fantastic amount. I sat at the light box or computer for the whole summer! Lindsey changed her holiday leave twice and we still never got a holiday!

This is a publicity shot taken just after the film was completed. Victor is now working with Tim Burton on character designs for his films. Incidentally, a total coincidence but I found out 14 years later that Rhonda, who took this photo (and I'd never met before) is now the partner of my best friend from school who I recently met up with again.

Back on track for my next post. Until then....

Flying Bike

2011-06-19T03:51:00.000-07:00

As promised, here is a little bit of animation this time. I needed a shot of the three flying bikes going past the camera. As you saw in the previous post I had the three bikes created as 3D models in Animation:Master. I animated the 3D model as required and exported this animation as a series of images and loaded them into Anime Studio.

In Anime Studio I already had the bike as a 2D Vector with all it's parts on separate layers. This was in a Group Layer so that all of the layers of the bike could be included. This Group Layer was placed in a Switch Layer and named as the correct frame number. A Switch Layer can contain many Sub Layers but only one of these can be displayed at any one time. They are usually used for Lip-Synch, containing sets of mouth shapes but are also ideal for times where frame by frame animation may be required. There isn't much frame by frame animation in 'Horace' but I decided this would be the best technique for the vehicles flying past camera. It was then just a matter of shifting the various layers of the bike parts around and scaling and adjusting them to match the frame rendered from Animation:Master.

For neatness I put all the images rendered from Animation:Master into a Group Layer and displayed them one at a time to trace. This screen capture shows all the images displayed at once.

A bike without a rider looks a little unsafe so I needed to place a character in the driving seat. The 3D render had a 'stand in' in place but I needed to add the real 2D rider. I started by posing Horace (just using Vector's no bones) on one of the bikes mid way through the animation. This pose was then copied to all the other bikes and adjusted as necessary.

In hindsight it would have been much better to have horace already in the Switch Layer with the bike and adjusted him at the same time. That's what I've done with the Fly By's I've done since and it's proved to be a much faster process.

I created an animated starfield in PD Pro Howler (it is a strange name for a painting / animation package I agree) as it's easy to do in this software. It's great software actually and worth looking at if you haven't heard of it.

Finally I composited the animation with the background and added a particle emitter to each exhaust in VisionLab. Incidentally, there is a new package being released by FXHome in July called HitFilm. It will be Editing, Compositing and effects creation all in one software. It's going to be even less expensive than VisionLab but far more powerful. It has a lot of features that After Effects doesn't so I think it will be a must have purchase. Take a look on HitFilm.com if you want to see what it can do.

Here is a video showing all the stages through to the final result. Thanks for looking.

Bikes

2011-05-07T07:16:00.000-07:00

Hi All,

I've been working on these flying bikes and trying to get a decent 2D design. They had to look like they were created from parts cobbled together from standard motorbikes so I didn't want anything too futuristic. The three bikes were roughly modelled in Animation:Master first as this will aid in the 2D animation especially. The first two were designed and modelled by my great friend George Laban. George is a brilliant animator having animated a whole early series of Postman Pat entirely on his own! I worked with him for 10 years on Bob The Builder. The third bike here was designed and modelled by me.

Once I had a view of the bike I liked I loaded the image into Anime Studio Pro and traced all the elements.

This is the result. Granny's bike, Horace's bike and Melodee's bike. Oh, and the dog flies as pillion on Melodee's too!

That's all for this time. I will have some animation to show you in the next post. Thanks for following.

Kitchen Background

2011-03-06T04:56:00.000-08:00

Hi All,

I'm back again with another post at last. I'm putting more effort into trying to secure funding these days but I've not stopped working on the project.
In an earlier post you will have seen that I had created this Kitchen background before using Serif DrawPlus. After experimenting in Anime Studio and viewing Parker's excellent background painting tutorials on the Lost Marble Anime Studio Forum I decided to try my hand at painting more backgrounds in Anime Studio. It's probably because I'm so used to using the drawing tools in AS but it felt more natural to me to create the backrounds this way.

I started by loading in my layout sketch into Anime Studio and tracing the walls and floor.

I then added some kitchen cupboards and a fridge on separate layers.

Next was a table and chairs.

Additional details were added on the table.

Finally, the kitchen had to look a mess after the robot CHESTA had been 'baking' in there so all these details were added. I only created one 'dough splat' and copied and pasted it around and adjusted the points a little to make them look different.

Out of interest I rendered a short animation. In the final shot characters come through the door and I will also animate elements in the background such as the dripping dough.

Melodee Character

2011-03-06T03:59:00.001-08:00

Hi Everyone,
This is a young girl called Melodee who, as the name would suggest, is very into music. She can play any instrument and has a music and MP3 type device attached to her wrist. Luckily I'd already created a version of her in Animation:Master a few years back. This came in very handy for, not only assisting in the creatiion of the character turnarounds but especially in seeing the wrist device in various poses.

This is the character as created in Animation:Master. I use Maya every day in my work but it's always a pleasure to come back to A:M. I had planned on creating this project in A:M originally but the rendering times of CG are so prohibitive without a decent render farm. Also, it's quite nice, after being involved in CG all day, to get back to drawing and creating in 2D even if it is still using computers.

I zoomed the camera in on the wrist device and while rotating the camera around the wrist rendered a series of images.

These images were loaded into Anime Studio Pro and traced. I could have worked the shapes out but this certainly saved some brain power.

The finished character looks much like that below. I've since made the arms slightly shorter and tweaked a little.

That's all for the moment. Thanks for looking.

Camera Move

2010-08-14T03:37:00.000-07:00

For the establishing shot at the start of my film I wanted a camera move. I could have done a straight track in like my previous Haunted House shot but I had in mind something a little more dramatic.

I loaded my rough storyboard image into Anime Studio and began tracing.

It soon became apparent that my rough storyboard image wouldn't be good enough for tracing when it came to the finer details so I created a layout drawing and continued from that tracing all the elements on to separate layers.

Once this was done I could construct the camera move. To start the illusion the two layers of hills on the lowest levels (at the back) were keyed at the start of the shot then dragged to the left and keyed on the final frame. This meant they now panned to the left. The bank in the foreground (with the flowers on) was panned to the right. This already gave the rough impression that the camera was moving around the house.

The most complicated part of the process was animating the house. I wasn't too concerned with the other objects in the scene as I didn't mind the trees etc appearing flat. The image below is of the final frame of the animation roughed in before various tweaks took place. You will notice that I zoomed the camera in too.

The house itself was constructed as below. The main part (front) was on one layer and the two sides on a separate two layers. I started by using the tools in Anime Studio (Perspective , Scale, Magnet, Move Point Tool etc) to get the house into it's final angle of viewing it from it's left side. The right side of the house is visible at the start of the shot but the left side is hidden beneath the front layer of the house. It was 'simply' a matter of scaling down the right side of the house and hiding it and scaling up the left side and revealing it as the house turned. There are surprisingly few keyframes involved.

Of course, for any other parts of the house where you see firstly the right side and then the left side I had to hide the left side at the start of the shot and reveal in a similar manner. A bit of point animation and tweaking and the final illusion seems quite effective.

For the cloud lightning I simply created a few white shapes with blurred edges on a layer above the clouds and animated them fading in and out in sequence.

I rendered each element out separately from Anime Studio as an image sequence (Targa's) with Alpha Channel. Note that if you render out to a QuickTime file you will need to make sure you select a codec (such as Animation) that has 'Millions of Colours +. The '+' being the Alpha Channel. I render to Targa's as still images always look cleaner to me and automatically contain the Alpha Channel.

The elements were imported one at a time into my compositing software Vision Lab.

Below you can see the separate elements in the Media Pool as they imported into Vision Lab.

After adjusting colours a little and adding light spill around some of the elements and a bit of blur etc (especially on the foreground bank) I exported the composited animation as separate images again to be imported into VirtualDub and saved out as an Avi for use in my video editing software.

The final shot....

That's it for this time. If you have any questions please ask and I will do my best to answer.

More Dog Stuff

2010-07-11T04:09:00.000-07:00

In order to create the animation I require from the dog ie: long shots of him running around I had to have a 'turnaround' of him similar to the one created for the Flea a while back. I tend to create these for all my character's as it's a great starting point. If you do this before you produce your storyboard you can pose your character for storyboards too.

Anyway. I started with the side view and, in Anime Studio Pro, created a front view.

I loaded the front and side views into Artrage on separate layers and lined them up.

Next I used the pencil to roughly draw an 'inbetween' of the head. It brings back memories of my 2D cel animation days this part! =0)

Once the whole dog was inbetweened I moved on to the next position in the rotation which is inbetween the side and back view. The back view is the easiest to create as you can usually just remove the face and other details and tweak the feet.

Once all the inbetweens had been created the drawings were loaded into Anime Studio Pro and traced. The individual parts were then put back together as shown below.

Of course I also had to do a rotation of the Flea House too as it was to be hanging from the dog's collar.

This is the completed Turnaround.

Below are three subsequent passes of animation starting with a rough blocking out and finishing with an almost completed animation.

Haunted House

2010-06-05T04:38:00.000-07:00

I'm a big fan of Hammer Films and the old Universal Horrors. It was only natural that I would, at some point, pay homage to these two huge influences on me.

This shot features a track towards a Haunted House. A few years ago I created a Haunted House in 3D so I used this as my starting point and traced it in Anime Studio.

I still have the door and door archway to trace in the above image. As I wanted to track towards the house I needed the various parts of the scene on separate layers so I could move them independently. I ended up with this.

It wasn't really satisfactory. It looked okay in my original storyboard sketch but now it looked wrong. I didn't like the tree and the streetlamp looked too modern. The gargoyle at the doorway wasn't right either.

Time to load up Artrage and, with a line of action as a starting point, I used the pencil to roughly sketch out a couple of trees and gargoyles.

These were loaded into Anime Studio and traced and filled.
Eventually I ended up with four scene elements on separate layers ready for compositing. Incidentally, I didn't worry too much about the colours of the individual elements for creating a depth effect (the further away parts of a scene get the less saturated and more blue they appear) as I knew I could adjust this in the compositing software.

I could have rendered out stills and imported these into the compositing software for animating but I decided to animate the camera in Anime Studio and render out 4 separate animations. This enabled me to animate the tree branches blowing in the wind too. Once I was happy with the animation I started loading the elements into VisionLab.

In the image above the first two elements have been loaded. I used a Light Spill filter on the house layer to add the appearance of light bleeding around it's edges from the moon behind.

Next to be imported was the mid ground layer. Here is how the project appears when it's first imported.

In order for the other layers to show through I needed to make the blue of the background transparent.

Under the Matte option I picked Key.

In the key filter options that opened I chose Colour Difference and selected Blue. After a little adjusting of the sliders the background was completely transparent. Now I needed to add some lighting effects.

In the Effects Panel I chose Optics and dragged a suitable light onto the lamp post. This had to be animated as the lamp post was moving closer to the camera. A keyframe at the start of the move and another at the end sufficed.

I also added a similar light to the lantern over the door and a Spotlight to the doorway itself to add to the effect. Next the foreground tree was imported.

Under the Effects Tab I chose Particles and added three layers of spooky green fog. By the way, VisionLab is an excellent application and the company, FXHome, that created it are always enthusiastic and helpful. Most off the effects presets are created by users and free to download. The Green Fog, for instance, is a preset that was created by me several years ago for uses such as in this very shot.

After a bit of tweaking the above image shows a frame as rendered from VisionLab. The frames were exported as Targa files and loaded into my editing software.

To finish I rendered out as a HD QuickTime Movie.

As always please feel free to comment or ask questions. See you soon.

A dog, a flea and a home

2010-04-17T03:17:00.000-07:00

Last time I showed you the Flea and mentioned a tutorial I'd written on 'Creating Characters for Animation in Anime Studio' using the Flea as an example. For those interested the tutorial is now available for download on the Smith Micro site here......

http://blog.smithmicro.com/cgi-bin/bblosxom.cgi/2010/04/06#100406_anime_studio_tutorial

The Flea had to have a home and, although I designed one years ago made out of matches, I was never really happy with it. I don't think a Flea would go to the trouble of making a house but would just move into some toy house. I simplified the design and came up with this in Anime Studio for the front.

I then created the side view which was much simpler being just a wall, side of the roof and a copy and pasted window from the front. I created the Flea House in Anime Studio because, as it's hanging from the dogs collar, I need it to be animated at times.

For the opening establishing shot of the film I want to have the camera slightly rotate around the character's home. Not this Flea house you understand but the main character's home but I thought this would be a good opportunity to see if it could be achieved easily in this software. You can create 3D objects in Anime Studio but you really have to make them out of geometric shapes and, as you can see from the image above, this would have been quite difficult with my design. So, I decided on a different approach. I attached the side of the house to the front and then scaled and 'tucked' the side behind the front so it was completely hidden. I then used perspective and scale tools in Anime Studio to make the front appear to be turning to the left as I revealed the side moving out from behind and scaling up.

The final result seems to be quite convincing considering it's only two main keyframes (the start and end) and I'm looking forward to trying it out and hopefully improving on it a little for the opening shot of the film.

The dog, Scratchit, had again been designed and modelled a long time ago but looking at him again recently I thought he seemed too 'generic'. I doodled in my sketchbook until I came up with elements of a design that I thought worked. Below are some of those scribbles and doodles.

I sketched out the dog properly and loaded the sketch into Anime Studio and traced round it. Here you can see the various elements of the side view split apart and ready for adding bones.

I like dogs and enjoy animating them. I was lucky enough to be asked to animate the first in - game animations of the dog in the latest Lego computer game and was then given all of the dog animations to do from then on. He was the character I enjoyed animating most. Anyway, here is my dog being animated by manipulating the bones.

The great thing about Anime Studio is the way you can use a combination of bone and point animation to animate including scaling bones and moving points for squash and stretch. Exaggerated a bit here but you get the idea....

Here is a test animation I did of the dog running complete with imported Flea House attached to his collar.

That's it until next time. I hope you enjoy these posts. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Flea Run

2010-04-02T04:30:00.000-07:00

Hi Everyone,

It's been a while hasn't it!? Things have gone crazy at work due to coming to the end of the new Lego video game which has left me shattered when I arrive home.

Apart from that I was asked by Smith Micro, the makers of the Anime Studio Pro software I use, if I'd do a tutorial for them. Obviously I was flattered that they asked me and also thought it'd be a good opportunity to show the whole process of creating characters in the software. I did greatly underestimate how long it would take me and the work involved however!

The manual features some great tutorials but it doesn't follow the whole process through for someone that wants to start at designing a character and end up with one they can animate fully and not just in the flat cut-out style.

Below is the test animation I did as an example to show what could be achieved. The tutorial will be up at Smith Micro next week I'm told. In the meantime I need to make the most of this Easter break and get some more stuff done to show you guys. Thanks for following .....and being patient =0)

New Character Mouth Shapes

2010-01-23T04:09:00.000-08:00

I've been creating a new character in Anime Studio. I've had a version of him for a long time but tried to develop him a little for this incarnation. I started with a rough sketch of a front view. This is the most boring view but I use this in AS as a starting point for creating 3/4 views and others.
The character was traced into AS using the vector tools. I rarely import images drawn in other software as, despite hearing of others complaints, I find the drawing tools in AS excellent.

The mouth area including the whole lower part of the face is created on a separate layer so that lip sync keys can be drawn. In this instance I only needed a few shapes as the Flea never talks but mostly laughs and makes noises. Here you can get an idea of how the mouth was constructed.

It might look complicated but it's not really. I had to create some shapes to hide those beneath. For example the dark inside of the mouth has a shape above it that contains the lips with an area around which is the same colour as the face so this acts as a mask to conceal the inner mouth that would otherwise show through. I next created a Switch Layer and placed the mouth inside. I copied this mouth layer a few times so that I could move points to produce the other mouth shapes required. Here is the layers palette showing the mouth shapes in the Switch Layer.

I ended up with these key shapes. Obviously for dialogue you would need a few more. New shapes can be added on the fly as the animation requires.

To create basic dialogue in AS it's simply a matter of advancing the timeline and 'switching on' the correct mouth shape for the sound on any particular frame. There are auto lip sync solutions included in the software but I don't use them. Next I turned on the 'smooth interpolation' option in the Switch Layer and rendered a quick test....

Lightning

2010-01-10T04:27:00.000-08:00

Firstly, Happy New Year! =0)
New years are great as it feels like we can go forward with new optimism and enthusiasm. Speaking of which, it's been a little while since I posted here but it doesn't mean I haven't been working on this project. I don't want to post absolutely everything I do or there will be nothing new to see when it's completed.

Well, I had this very short shot to complete that consisted of a door swinging open to reveal the robot just as lightning flashed which scares Granny for a moment as she looks on. I chose a fairly dramatic upward view (almost from Granny's point of view) to make the robot appear even more foreboding. The first step was to create the background, without the door, at the required angle. This was roughed out in Artrage then completed in DrawPlus.

Next I posed my robot character in Anime Studio Pro and tilted the layer using the Rotate Layer XY tool and moved the camera until I had the correct view. It's a bit of a cheat but the shot is so short that I think it gives the impression I wanted. I exported the image as a large .png to preserve transparency.

Next I imported the .png into ArtRage and traced the character on a new layer in black to create a silhouette.

The door was animated in Anime Studio Pro once the background and character had been placed on layers. At this point I needed to create the lightning flash. I could have just done a few frames of white or even over exposed a few frames in my editing software. However, when I was younger I used to study animated films on a Super 8 editor I had which was useful as the film could be wound through the gate by hand a frame at a time. I learned a lot about animation in those days. It was almost impossible to do that with the advent of VHS but luckily it's again possible with DVD or BluRay. I remembered that I was fascinated all those years ago by a shot from Disney's Sleeping Beauty. It's right at the end where the Prince is fighting Maleficient and as she transforms into a huge dragon there is a dramatic flash of lightning. It's not just a flash of a few white frames though. Shown below is what I noted at the time. The frames are listed on the left and then you can see that the character is lit separately to the background over 16 frames!

I created a series of white and yellow silhouettes of the character in ArtRage and a set of layers with coloured backgrounds in Anime Studio. I placed these in Switch Layers so it was easy to alternate them during the animation.

Here is the finished shot. I rotated the camera (canted view) in order to disorient the viewer further. The additiuon of a thunder sound effect and the illusion is complete. Created by me....with a little help from Disney =0)

Backgrounds

2009-11-08T12:42:00.000-08:00

I've been creating some backgrounds and thought I'd demonstrate how I go about producing one.

I normally start by sketching out the rough idea on paper or directly into Artrage on the computer. In this instance I had the basic idea in my head and started straight in Artrage.

The rulers in Artrage are incredibly useful for creating the perspective drawing as you can pin one end and rotate from there.

I originally intended having a wooden floor but it just looked too busy so it (like many other things) got changed as the drawing progressed.

Below is the completed background after fully creating the vector artwork in DrawPlus. It will need toning down a little as it's too vibrant for the character to stand out well against it.

Granny walks!

2009-10-17T03:36:00.000-07:00

I've been using the Blend Morph sliders in order to create this shot of Granny turning slightly as she walks carrying a huge pile of washing.

I had a few problems with the IK pulling Granny's right foot around a bit after it was placed. After several attempts at correcting this I found the easiest solution was to just create another right foot and place it on a layer on top of the original. I scaled the original down once it was in position to ensure it was completely concealed. Sometimes finding solutions to problems can be almost as enjoyable as the animation itself =0)

Why Blend morphs?....

2009-10-04T03:08:00.000-07:00

I've been busy getting another character ready for animation and experimenting with Blend Morphs in Anime Studio Pro. The robot, seen previously, was intended to simply 'flip' from front view to side view rather than have smooth head turns as I thought this would suit his robotic form. Some purists may disagree but I do quite like the snappy motion this gives and, if the move is preceeded by a few frames of good anticipation then it works very well. However, to contrast with this I wanted the Granny especially (being older and slower) to have smoother motion. Therefore I decided to experiment with the Blend Morphs. You can see how they work here.....

I've created head turns before using actions in AS but the new Blend Morphs feature means you can combine the reusable poses, as you would in a 3D package. I've quickly created a head turn to demonstrate how it works in an animation.

That's it for now. Feel free to leave questions or comments.

A Bit of History

2009-09-26T03:21:00.000-07:00

This is a project that started, believe it or not, in 1988! A friend, Kevan Goode, and I were trying to come up with an idea for a kids cartoon series that we would have enjoyed when we were kids. The name Horace was chosen as a tribute to my Grandfather. A simple cel animation pilot was completed in 1990. In fact, we even got as far as being offered a contract to produce a series. I find this difficult to believe when viewing the film today! However, for various reasons, we decided to decline the offer. It's a long story!

Recently I had the desire to resurrect the project. The concept and characters have been vastly changed and improved to the point where it`s hardly recognisable as having developed from that cel animation original. I intended to produce the new pilot using Martin Hash's Animation:Master. I created several characters and did many tests in A:M and it was coming along fine. Tragically, Kevan died of a brain tumour just after Christmas 2004 and I lost interest in the project for quite a while.

Despite having lots of idea's that I'd like to pursue I keep coming back to 'Horace'. It's always been very personal to me and I know I've got to get it out of my system at some point and get it done! After finding and experimenting with Anime Studio Pro I made the decision to switch to 2D. There are many reasons for this. Mainly because I think 3D was simply going to take too long to produce. The modeling, texturing, lighting and rendering etc is quite a long process. It's about as easy as it can be in A:M but still time consuming. For instance, A:M is no slouch but one test shot took well over 24 hours to render!

I decided that it was going to be much more practical and economical (especially if we got a commission for a series) to go the 2D route. Kids still love drawn animation and there is a lot of magic in moving drawings that 3D often doesn't seem to capture. Another reason was that after working very long days using Maya in my day job it was becoming increasingly difficult to then continue in the same vein at home.

Below are some of the tests I did in Animation:Master.

Here is a new animation I've almost completed of CHESTA the robot. This time created in Anime Studio Pro of course. This obviously isn't the correct background and Granny will be in the foreground too.

I think that's just about it for this post. I hope to be back sooner next time. If you have any questions or comments please do so using the 'comments' button.

Let's Get Started...

2009-09-05T04:38:00.000-07:00

This is the first of what I hope will be many posts detailing the production of my animated short film.

I always find it very amusing when people's first question on seeing an impressive piece of work is "What software did you use?"! As if the software was somehow totally responsible =0) I'm not easily impressed by software. I use what I find I get on with and not what happens to be considered 'in vogue' at the time. The software I'm using for animation is Anime Studio Pro. I've tried CelAction, Flash and ToonBoom amongst others but I find AS far more logical and intuitive and therefore it suits my needs better. It's also extremely affordable. Always a good point that =0)

The same can be said for all the software I'm intending to use for my project. So, to start off it seems a good idea to introduce the software in my toolkit.

Celtx

Celtx is great free software. I'm using it for scriptwriting as it formats scripts correctly. That's not essential if you're working alone but it's good working practice. You can also use Celtx for compiling storyboards, scheduling and overseeing your whole film production.

Artrage

I use Artrage for quickly sketching all my storyboard panels. It's incredibly easy to use and has all the usual features such as layers as well as some nice natural media brushes. The User Interface is great too!

Video Pro X

I'm using this for compiling all my storyboard panels into an animatic and synching with the soundtrack and also adding sound effects and music where appropriate. Video Pro X will be used for final editing also.

Anime Studio Pro

As previously mentioned, Anime Studio Pro will be used for all the animation. It has the most advanced bone system of any 2D software and the vector points can also be animated after the skeletal animation to enhance the movement if required.

Here you can see bones being added to a character's hand

A character fully rigged in 'front pose'

DrawPlus

A nice vector drawing package. I intend using this for most of the backgrounds. I'm going for a fairly flat look which vectors are suited to. Using vectors also means I can enlarge the images to any size without loss of quality.

VisionLab

For final compositing (if I don't do it all in Anime Studio) and effects I will use VisionLab Studio. I've used this on previous projects and it's powerful and easy to use.

This image is from a previous project - a 'proof of concept' for BBC
The animation (manipulation of photo images) was all created in Anime Studio Pro and compositing and certain effects such as light from the window was done in VisionLab
Below is a shot from the finished presentation

Well, that's it for this time. Thanks for following so far. Be back soon......