Animation and Video Life

Merry Christmas from Animation and Video Life.  It's the most wonderful time of the year... well not yet. The Nightmare Before Christmas is not just the animated Tim Burton movie, it's also the nightmare of trying to make your own animated holiday messages in the week before Christmas. Animation takes time. Why didn't you start those in November?! If this sounds like your nightmare, here are five free or low(ish) cost apps to help you back to sharing the joy of the season with animation, so it truly will be the most wonderful time of the year. Cartoon Animator 4 (or iClone7 ) Reallusion Marketplace search 'Christmas'. If you're already a power user (or even know your way around it a little bit) you'll know CA4 is one of the fastest ways to make completely custom animations. The Reallusion Marketplace has a bunch of Christmas content you can utilize, just don't be too ambitious. Drop in a background, throw in a Santa character, record a short message f

Christian Haynes - Zack In Time.  If you've ever wanted to create an animated TV series staring your own original characters and stories then Los Angeles based writer, director, and animator, Christian Haynes is taking those next steps of putting together a team, developing a pitch/trailer for their series, Zack In Time. Featuring professional studio quality animation, they hope the show will get picked up by an animation studio for an official series. The path he and his team are taking is one you could easily follow as they deal with real life commitments, and building a following on Instagram and Tik-Tok showcasing their work behind the scenes. TET: Tell me a little about yourself. Who you are, and why you started animating? My name is Christian Haynes and I've loved animation ever since I was a kid. I would constantly be drawing cartoon characters from TV shows and movies and making my own little homemade comic strips.  As I got older, I became a lot more interested in st

A selection of Comicgen Characters. Readers of Animation and Video Life will know I'm always on the look out for any kind of free character creator tool.  While Comicgen Comic Creator isn't exactly the best character creator it caught my eye because it's completely free to use, and the available character designs really lend themselves to that edgy, limited style animation that has somewhat influenced mainstream animated shows of late. ComicGen's Comic Creator Comicgen's Character Creator. Comicgen was created by the team at Gramener , a data, science consulting and A.I. service that likes to present their findings as 'data stories' sometimes in the form of a comic. However, drawing not being a strong skill, they decided to make a tool that could provide them with characters they could just export into their own comic panels. That's how Comicgen was born. Interestingly, if you have drawing skills, Gramener will pay you to create characters for their app

Always start with a good microphone.  Bad Audio is widely considered the number one reason people will stop listening to a podcast or watching a video. While your audio doesn't have to be amazing it does, at least, have to be clear and audible for listeners to not give up on it. I've always had trouble recording my own voice because I'm naturally softly spoken. When I do speak up I can't maintain it for long sentences. Even with quality microphones, the higher range of my natural speaking voice isn't that loud - even with my mouth less than a foot away. As you can imagine, recording three and a half hours of me talking while demonstrating all the features of a software application, as I do in The Lazy Animator Beginner's Guide to Cartoon Animator , was always going to result in some pretty uneven audio (who can remember to keep talking loud while you're concentrating on a demonstration). I thought my audio was passable but I did get some strong feedback, pri

One way to give your animated productions the best chance of success is to prescreen them with a test audience before you release them publicly online or send them off to a festival etc. Big, Hollywood studios do this all the time so they can make changes that will hopefully give their movies a better chance for success, so why shouldn't you? While it may not be practical to gather an audience together, and have them sign a bunch of non disclosure agreements, for your 2-3 minute animated production, Screenlight is a free (with paid options for additional features), convenient, online app, that's a great alternative. Screenlight is actually intended to be a group productivity tool for gaining client feedback on every step of a video production but the 'free forever,'  single user, one project,basic account, is an ideal feedback tool for small, independent productions and hobby animators. Simply upload your video(s) (up to 1 Gigabyte) to your Screenlight Project, share t

From 2012 to 2020 I ran a service called Animation 4 Business that created animated explainer videos for businesses and educational organizations world wide. It started as a group of three freelancers (including myself. obviously), then became just me for a couple of years, and then expanded to me and three other subcontractor animators until 2020. For me it was a very successful side hustle that could have been a full time job if I hadn't subcontracted quite as much of the work out, or charged more per animation. My base fee per two minute animation was just under USD$500.00 using Vyond as my animation studio. I know a considerable number of animators that say Vyond isn't real animation in the sense that you, personally, don't animate everything from scratch. However, it's not all modifying templates with your own information either.  Vyond's content library is quite vast at this point. A good Vyond animator, who is very familiar with the library, can run circles