Animation and Video Life

I'm always on the lookout for cartoon avatar makers of any kind, whether it be ones that 'cartoonify' your photo, or ones that let you build a cartoon likeness from a library of individual features.  Free Avatar Maker  falls into the latter category and can be used for making head and shoulder cartoon avatars. While it doesn't have an extensive library of character features (you may struggle to get a good likeness), uniquely it will make your avatar in four different art styles concurrently, allowing you to save the one you like most, or even all four.  I wasn't overly impressed how my TET avatar looked in the first two styles, but style three is quite possibly the coolest looking version of my avatar I've ever seen in a third party avatar creator. It's a very contemporary style. Style four, line art, is also not too bad. Avatar Maker's User Interface. Switch between the four different art styles shown across the top at any time. I particularly like the

Once you start getting into character animation you learn pretty quickly that people don't just speak with their mouths. Hand gestures and movements play a pretty important part of how people communicate too. The problem is, animating hand gestures and movements is extremely time consuming... and who knows what gestures and movements should be used and when? In Reallusion's Cartoon Animator I use pre-animated talking character motions that I chop and move gestures around so the arm and hand movements 'feel' right based on my own understanding of body language (and I also act out dialogue to get a sense of what arm and hand movements I might make with what's being spoken). Recently I came across a video by the creator of Culpamland Extra , an online animated series, in which they briefly outlined how they animate talking using the Family Guy Method. I'd never heard of this, and if you try to search for it online you'll be hard pressed to find anything. So I&

Harrison Killian sculpting a character head for his animated short, Rider on the Storm. Residing on a mountaintop in Liberty, located in the Catskill Mountains of New York, and primarily self-taught, Harrison Killian is a musician, sculptor, animator, and the founder of Grateful Motion Studios  which is currently producing an independent animated short film, ‘Rider On The Storm.’  The film uses Harrison's, groundbreaking, animation technique that fuses the artistry of stop-motion with the precision of CGI, creating imagery that blurs the line between reality and animation, leaving audiences questioning if what they saw was animated or real. 'Rider On The Storm' is culled from a feature-length screenplay written by Harrison that received high industry scores, landing it on the Red List on Coverfly . Written to evoke emotions and inspire imaginations, the story is about a boy named Rider who is orphaned at seven and endures a childhood of bullying by other orphans and abuse a

Moho 14 Released. Regular readers know I am a Reallusion, Cartoon Animator advocate through and through. Hands down I would recommend Cartoon Animator 5 first over Lost Marble's Moho 14 to anyone who is just starting in 2D animation, is a team of one, or just needs to animate as quickly as possible. However, feature for feature, Moho is, arguably, the best 2D animation software for the rest of us who can't justify a Toon Boom Harmony , or Adobe Creative Cloud subscription (and even with their applications Moho is very competitive on features). You can get started with Moho Debut for just USD$59.99 which is a cut down version of Moho Pro but it still has the most essential features needed for 2D animation. While Moho Pro is a whopping USD$399.99 (Cartoon Animator, which only has one version, is just USD$149.00) upgrades to new version numbers come down to a quarter of the price at USD$99.00. Even though Reallusion just released features like Motion Pilot Puppet Animation and

While AI applications may have been receiving a lot of bad press lately in the visual arts, there are definitely times when AI is a game changer, in a good way, for more mundane applications like audio cleaning and transcribing. Maybe there's some militant audio engineers or transcribers out there who just love what they do but the ability to give an audio file to an AI, and have it automatically improve the quality of sound or transcribe an hour or more of speech in seconds, is pure magic. Sure the AI doesn't always get it right, particularly with transcribing, but it's pretty good. Plus, correcting a few short falls is certainly better than doing all the work yourself. I recently recorded a thirty minute video with audio that was borderline awful. It was clear enough to understand but I hadn't been able to filter out the static noise of the microphone, and it would distort on the louder sections, just enough to notice, even though the levels were well under the clippi

Created with Lywi.com Comic Maker. One really exciting use for Cartoon Animator and other animation software is to assist in the production of creating motion comics. If you're not familiar with motion comics just think of them as a kind of video comic book that typically features (but not always) all of the dialogue in each panel read by voice actors along with limited animation to make the still images more dynamic and visually interesting. Below is a demonstration motion comic I made many years ago when I reviewed Smith Micro's Motion Artist software (which has since been discontinued but, if you can find a copy, its entire purpose was to create motion comics and other motion graphics). Follow the link to the review if you want to see how this was made. The great thing about motion comics is that they're much easier to animate than an animated cartoon short. Often much of the animation will be moving a a static image of a character, panning the camera across a scene cre