Featured Animator: Enjoyinglifeinseoul (ELIS) - Lucky Coin! Lucky Day!

GoAnimator Enjoyinglifeinseoul (ELIS) is the February winner of my GoAnimate, Get Featured in TET's Blog contest. ELIS has had his account with GoAnimate since March of 2011 and in that time has had eight staff picks and created 40 animations.

ELIS decided to feature his latest animation, Lucky Coin! Lucky Day!, for a number of reasons as he explains below;

First, I wanted to feature something new on your blog. If I had not finished this on time, I have no idea which one of my old ones I would have selected. 

Second, I chose it because this might have been the best time I ever had making an animation. It was a blast making fun of myself and I was laughing the whole time. 

Lastly I chose it, because I made it for Commedus, (Without him and our friendship this animation would never have come to be and I will go into that more in a moment.) I also pay tribute to several other animators in the animation, which I like to do from time to time.

Lucky Coin! Lucky Day! is a humorous look at what can happen to those who don't believe in 'magic', in this case the power of a lucky coin. Aside from the laugh out loud script, visually the animation features wonderfully detailed backgrounds, that are becoming ELIS's trademark, enhanced with quite a bit of custom flash work that's worth looking out for. Watch the animation below then continue reading as ELIS takes you behind the scenes with some very detailed notes about his process.

Lucky Coin! Lucky Day! by enjoyinglifeinseoul on GoAnimate

Video Maker - Powered by GoAnimate.

Inspiration

The whole idea sprang from the Coin/Penny. Last fall I was making the bills that were used in this animation for an installment of my Mr. Robsomeone series and I thought, “Ah I should put Commedus on the $1 bill as a joke.” And then I thought, “No a penny would be even funnier.”

So I created the penny, but in the process, as Mr. Robsomeone would say, “Inspiration struck!” I thought about Commedus being a magician by trade and the English phrase “Find a penny pick it up and all day long you’ll have good luck.” I thought “Wow I could make an animation on that.” From there the animation came to life.

Let me explain the friendship Commedus and I share. We respect and encourage all the time. We also praise and give each other a hard time, often in the same sentence. We have a lot of fun with it, sometimes in the forums or comments, other times in messages.

So I came up with the idea of rejecting The Commedus Penny and magic. If you’ve seen the animation you know how well that went for me. Mean while I wanted to show the opposite results from the decision I had made. So I enlisted Miramanee, a good friend of Commedus to play the other lead role. She naturally accepts and embraces the Commedus penny and magic, and things go quite differently for her.

As for the other roles, I had thought of playing all of them myself, but decided since this was a gift, I wanted to get more people involved. I had mentioned it to Smirks, earlier in the week and he said he would gladly play the other roles if need be. I think both he and Miramanee, did a wonderful job with their lines, especially since they had to play 3 or 4 roles each. Thank you so much you guys!

Challenges, Problems, and Techniques

I’ll start with the first two and that will lead to my solution. The main challenge/problem I had is mainly my own fault and that unfolds two parts.

As you know I love to make my own backgrounds and I usually make them highly detailed often with small insignificant things that I am sure many viewers miss. My girlfriend often teases me about the amount of time I spend on them and that not many people will notice, or that the scene I spent three hours making only lasted 3 seconds. To that I say. “But I will notice.” And she just laughs.

The problem with me making highly detailed backgrounds is only a problem, because I do not script write. I come up with an idea, think of a beginning and an end and fill it in as I make the animation. This allows my creative juices to flow continuously, it is also is a pit trap.

You see I will start making a scene and then jump to another and another as the ideas come in. Then I will add some more sequences to the various scenes, with the character’s actions etc. However, sometimes I will look at one of the scenes/backgrounds and think, ah man it needs this detail or this would look better over here.

The problem is that I have already made many additional scenes in the animation based on the original ones. It is no easy task to just add something new or move an object that has already been placed in multiple scenes. After all you have to send things backwards or bring them forward, with the amount of detail I usually include, it can be quite tedious and time consuming, not to mention hard on your fingers and wrists. “Oh the pain! The swollen knuckles!”

The solution that I have come up with is that, from now on, I will look at each background and try and create like a painter does a canvas from the back forwards, and I will do my best to make sure it is complete before I add additional scenes in that sequence. At least that is what I want to do in theory. I am also going to try and screen write. Shutter the thought.

In closing, one technique that I further developed making this animation partly addresses the problem I just mentioned about adding new elements to a highly layered scene. This involves placing the new element, but instead of sending in backwards “X” number of times, copy the other props that are in the foreground as a group by holding shift as you select them. Then delete the originals and paste the copies. I came up with this near the end of making my entry Hitting the Highway in TET's contest. And refined it more on this one.

It can save a lot of time, but you need to select the various props in the correct order. What I do is open a blank scene and then paste the objects there first. This way you will see if any that should be in the background are now closer up and vice versa. This technique also only really works, if the objects are not themselves behind other objects that were not behind the new pasted one. Otherwise it leads to a lot of confusion.

Speaking of confusion, I feel that perhaps I have gone on for quite long enough. I have written a novel, so I will will finish with one last thought...

I made two interior backgrounds in this animation. The Pub, which might be one of my favorites of all time is highly detailed. However, when I was working on the curry house and adding details, I found that I really liked it for it's simplicity. Some times more is just more. Food for thought.

If you've enjoyed ELIS's work then why not check out more of his animations on GoAnimate.

Runner up Featured GoAnimators for the month of February included:

• Crinkle Cut Animation
• Grub Films
• Makina Verde v5
• funny shorts™