Animation and Video Life

A friend of mine recommended I should check out The Big Lez Show after I mentioned to him I make animations for living. He said the show's creator, Australian animator, Jarrad Wright, just makes episodes from his home using MS Paint.Somewhat shamefully I hadn't heard of The Big Lez Show, but the fact that it was being made with MS Paint absolutely hooked me into checking out. If you've never heard or seen the show then you, like I was, are probably thinking how good could it be? MS Paint has kind of a cult following of hardcore animators but no one would use it as their primary animation tool on a series, right?WARNING - before going any further, you need to know The Big Lez Show and its humor contains some pretty strong language. By strong I mean it's peppered very liberally with the 'F' and 'C' words and is very every day Aussie, blue collar speak. Unapologetically, all of that, is part of why it's so good. There's a good chance you've met…

Reallusion released Cartoon Animator Update 4.3 with much fanfare about its new Adobe After Effects plugin which is a game changer all on its own. The ability to export a CA4 project with its layers intact into AE for additional video compositing should be a head turner for industry pros looking to take advantage of some of CA4's more unique features and reduced workflows.For those of us not in the Adobe ecosystem (and there are a lot of you out there) Reallusion did not leave you without something to get excited about.Also in the 4.3 update is the ability to export your project as an Object Based Sequence. Essentially this exports each element of your project to its own folder, audio included. If an object has any animation on it at all it will be exported as sequentially numbered, transparent PNG files.This is pretty much what the AE Export plugin does but that plugin also includes much more information like animation and camera keys, z-plane spacing and more. As well the AE plu…

Animating stick figures is almost a right of passage for any animator who has ever made an old fashioned flipbook or discovered the free stickman animator app, Pivot Animator.There's also the hugely popular viral stick figure animation, Animator Versus Animation and its sequels by Alan Becker that continue to inspire variations more than 12 years later.Back when Vyond was GoAnimate they had a stick figure theme that was popular site wide despite having many other themes with much more refined Saturday morning cartoon style characters.I even had my own stick figure series, Harry Chalk, on GoAnimate.Long story short, I was looking through the Reallusion Cartoon Animator Marketplace and discovered there really weren't any well designed, traditional looking stick figure characters.That's not to say there weren't any at all but I wanted something similar to GoAnimate's stick figures which included full facial features and male and female versions. Rather than just recre…

I've been on the hunt for a while now for the best, free, open source, video editing application out there. In Shotcut, by Meltytech, which has versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux, I think I may have found a real front runner.
This won't be a feature filled review, rather it will be my first impressions after having used Shotcut on a few of my YouTube videos so far.
One of my key criteria for a video editor is the ability to import any video format directly into the project. This may seem like an odd focus initially but having convert video to something your video editor can use is annoyingly time consuming, and it creates a new generation of footage, potentially with a loss in quality if you don't really know much about video format specs (that's this guy right here!).
Shotcut will happily work with my OBS recordings (.FLV), and .MOV, .MP4 files that I get from two different cameras. Not only that but Shotcut doesn't hold me up making lower quality versions of my fo…

Learn 2D animation with a tutorial for beginners that is an easy to follow mini video course for busy people. Get started by devoting just ten minutes a day to learn the step by step plan you need to make it easy to produce your own 2D animations.2D Animation 101 presents a free 2D animation foundation course that runs you through the entire process of producing professional, cinema quality animation, from idea through to finished production using Cartoon Animator 4 as your primary animation studio.Each section of the course includes a few short videos that can be viewed in around ten minutes, with the whole course taking just five days overall (ten minutes per day). At the end of the course you'll receive three free printable workbooks to help produce your next animation using the step-by-step plan you just learned.If you've always wanted to produce your own animated cartoons but thought you couldn't simply because you can't draw this mini course will give you options…

One thing Cartoon Animator 4 still does not have in stage mode is the ability to onion skin previous and next frames. 
For those complete animation newbies among you, onion skinning is the ability to see through the current frame to your previous and/or next keyframes so you can see the progression of your character or object's movement as you create and adjust each keyframe. Usually the previous and next frames appear lighter so your current frame remains the key focus.
This prompted me to look for a tool that could overlay an image over my work to use as a reference while still allowing me to work on the app underneath the overlay. I had seen, and even used such apps in the past but it had been some time so I decided to see what was out there, preferably free and/or open source, with versions for Mac and Windows.
Overlay 2There are actually a number of apps that do nothing more than overlay an image but the only one I could find that has both Windows and Mac versions is Overlay 2.
Y…