Skip to main content

Animation: The Star Wars Fan


With Disney taking over the Star Wars franchise you can be sure there will still be Star Wars fans in the future - still bitching about how the original trilogy is still the best and how everything else pales by comparison no doubt.

In a not too distant future, The Tourist and his travel companion, Mia, are standing on a subway platform with their R2D2 replica droid. They are approached by a Metro City Policeman, who just happens to be a Star Wars fan, and sees an opportunity to recreate a famous scene from the film.



Behind the scenes, this GoAnimation is the most spontaneous I've made in a long time. I happened to notice that fellow GoAnimator, RoTV, had made a character approximation of himself using GoAnimates Anime theme and wondered what I could come up with trying to create a version of me.

Thus I came up with blonde haired 'Tourist' that you see in my video.

I always depict myself wearing suits. I don't know why because I am the person least most likely to wear a suit, unless the occasion specifically says 'formal', then I'll wear the one suit I actually own. However, the final character gave off a bit of a Dr Who vibe to me (it was the suit). Since he is the Tourist, a travelling companion made sense. Mia is what I came up with.

GoAnimate's Anime character creator is very new. The characters you can create are largely based around teen, school age, characters. Mia was my best effort at creating a mature female character that wouldn't make the Tourist look like he had a thing under age girls.

My favorite period from Dr Who is Tom Baker's run at the character, specifically the period when his traveling companion was Romana (Romana II, Lalla Ward), a fellow Time Lord from his home planet, Gallifrey, and robot dog companion, K-9. Consequently the Tourist and Mia needed a robot companion along the same line. Solarbaby's wonderful character prop of R2-D2 was the obvious choice without any effort on my part.

Why anyone would be travelling with an R2 unit I don't know but it could happen. There are so many replica units around as we speak, maybe the Tourist made his own with future technology that enables it to do everything the original movie R2 unit can?

Now I had three characters that I needed to do something with. I put them in a subway scene - thinking, well he is a tourist so maybe he's doing some touring on the subway.

Having watched the remake of Total Recall recently,  I remembered the robotic UFB security soldiers from that film. GoAnimate's Space Citizens theme has a soldier style character that could take on a similar role, giving the impression that my characters were on a subway in the future rather than the present.

From there it was really a short leap to noticing the similarity to my scenario and that of the famous Landspeeder confrontation between Luke Skywalker, Ben Kenobi, C-3PO, R2-D2 and a Stormtrooper at Mos Eisley.

How could a die hard Star Wars fan pass that up?!

I pretty much started writing the dialogue to see how the conversation might pan out.

The resolution is supposed to suggest that the Tourist possibly has some similar Jedi mind control like ability but a comment by Pitch to the Rhino Productions on the video's GoAnimate page suggests that the Metro Cop picks up on the line "You don't need to see her papers" as a continuation of his attempt to recreate the scene. Hence he's not actually being mind controlled, he's just acting out his scene as planned, forgetting his suspicions about Mia. I like that interpretation better than mine as it does make the scene just a little funnier.

You might ask why a mix up in pop culture references would cause the cop to become suspicious. Aside from the fact that there is an obvious reminder of Star Wars in the R2 unit, I was thinking that perhaps such a mistake might indicate that a person is not a local on Earth. Who knows - maybe they have a problem with aliens disguising themselves as humans and a pop culture faux pas could be an indicator of deception.

You probably noticed I voiced all three characters. I really don't like asking people to voice my animations. Not the fun little projects like this. It causes delays and you end up with all different levels of recording quality and performance. I figure I'll just start practicing on developing my own voices that have enough difference to register as different people. It kind of works in this I think.

So that's the story. No technical magic in this one. Just characters and script. I hope you enjoyed it.

Popular posts from this blog

Should You Buy or Upgrade to MOHO 13? *Spoiler* Yes. Yes You Should!

MOHO 13's New Character Set. Smith Micro released MOHO 13 , their all in one, 2D animation studio, this week. The question is should you buy or upgrade to the latest version? Obviously I've already spoiled this in the title, so the actual question is why do I think you should buy or upgrade? To be clear, I'm only talking about MOHO 13 Pro. If you're considering MOHO 13 Debut be aware that you're missing out on some of the new features, and a lot of existing features that are only available in the Pro version. Debut is fine if the budget doesn't stretch to Pro, but, if you never want to be disappointed about not having a feature, it's Pro or nothing! The other thing I need to be transparent about is I'm not, by any stretch, a frequent MOHO user/animator. However I took the time to learn MOHO 12 Pro fairly extensively, blogging about my process and sorting out 104 free MOHO training videos into a logical viewing order in the process. I think I ha

AE Juice - Animation Presets, Motion Graphics, Templates, Transitions for After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Other Video Applications

Level up you video edits and animations with AE Juice's motion graphics and templates. Some days you just don't have the time to create flashy motion graphics for your latest video or animation. For some of us it's more a question of our own artistic abilities being a little less than the awesome we'd like them to be. Whatever reason a resource like AE Juice's animation presets, motion graphics, templates, and transitions packs for After Effects , Premiere Pro , and other video applications can really make your work stand out very quickly. AE Juice gives you access to an instant library of free, premade content elements and sound effects, which you can add to with additional purchases of various themed packs from their store. There are three ways to manage their content, all of which can be used in commercial projects . The AE Juice Standalone Package Manager makes it easy to browse previews of all your pack contents and to download and find just the elements yo

Review: CrazyTalk Animator 3 vs Moho Studio Pro 12

Reallusion's CrazyTalk Animator 3 or Smith Micro's Moho Studio Pro 12. Which of these 2D animation applications is right for you? Regular readers of this blog will know I'm a strong supporter, and fairly proficient user of CrazyTalk Animator since version 1. It's a great piece of software for producing 2D animations from purchased content quickly and, with version 3, is easier than ever to create animations from your own art. Lesser known is that I first purchased Moho Studio Pro 12 (then known as Anime Studio Pro 9) back in October of 2012 and have been upgrading it to the latest version ever since because I believed in it as an application for creating great 2D animation to TV quality standard. As such, it's a much more complex application than CTA3 that I only got around to learning properly late last year. I'm still in the process of blogging my progress . Despite this I feel I've learned enough of Moho to compare it to CTA3 to help you determ

Can You Learn Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 5 for Free Using Their 137 Official YouTube Video Tutorials Sorted Into a Logical Learning Order?

Or you could just buy The Lazy Animator Beginner's Guide to Cartoon Animator . While Reallusion's Cartoon Animator is one of the easiest 2D animation studios to get up and running with quickly, learning it from all of the official, free, video tutorials can be more overwhelming than helpful. With more than 137 videos totaling more than 28 and a half hours of tutorials, spread across three generations of the software (Cartoon Animator 3 through 5) it's hard to know if what you're learning is a current or legacy feature that you either need to know or can be skipped. Many of the official tutorials only teach specific features of the software and don't relate at all to previous or later tutorials. As a result there are many features either not mentioned or are hard to find. To make your learning easier, on this page, I've collected together all of the essential, official, free video tutorials and sorted them into a learning order that makes sense. Simply start at

Make Disney/Pixar Style Characters with Reallusion's Character Creator and Toon Figure Bases

The Extraordinary Tourist Classic Coat outfit created using Reallusion's Toon Designer for CC3. I've talked before how I've wanted to get into 3D Disney/Pixar style character animation since I first saw the animated cutscenes for the very first Tomb Raider game back in 1996. It's why I initially bought Reallusion's iClone 3D studio app as soon as I could afford a computer that would run it. But then Reallusion released their 3D Character Creator (CC) for iClone and I wanted to create my characters with that (and I did try with Bat Storm ). But the focus of CC was realism, even with ToKoMotion's stylised body morphs . Now with Reallusion's Cartoon Designer bundle for CC3 which features two packs, Toon Figures , and Toon Hair , designing Disney/Pixar style 3D characters just got a whole lot quicker. The two packs are the bare essentials for creating Toon style characters. Five body morphs (2 male, 2 female, and one adolescent body morph that w

TimeBolt: Fast Video Editing for Anyone Creating Online Courses, Podcasts, or Vlogs.

I resisted making tutorial videos for a long time because I don't like editing. Specifically I don't like editing me teaching as I step students through a process during a screen record. I have a tendency to insert long pauses not just in the middle of sentences but between multiple words in the middle of sentences as my pace matches what I'm doing onscreen. This makes for very long and very slow paced video tutorials. To counteract this I have to edit out all the pauses. This can take hours, or even days on particularly long tutorials. For example, when I created my main course, The Lazy Animator Beginner's Guide to Cartoon Animator , I literally injured the thumb on my right hand, operating my mouse, as I spent weeks taking out all my pauses (seriously, I had to wear a thumb brace for a few weeks to fix the pain). Recently I came across TimeBolt , a very affordable, fast editing application with the featured purpose of removing all the pauses from your video (and even

Creating a G3-360 Head From a Single Photo in Reallusion's Cartoon Animator

Source Photo from Generated Photos . Ever since Reallusion introduced the G3-360 Character Head into Cartoon Animator 4 I've wanted to see if their 360 Head Creator tool could be used to create an animated head using a photo. Part of the reason I've never given this a shot, until now, is that I just assumed it would be difficult, and require a lot of photo editing to blend out the sprite edges. It turns out, creating a photographic G3-360 head is not that much more difficult than creating a cartoon head, and can be done using a single photographic image using my own G3-360 head rigging system . While this article isn't intended to be a full tutorial, I'll run through the basic steps of how I achieved my photographic G3-360 head, shown in the comparison below, of a Cartoon Animator Morph-based head on the left, and my G3-360 head on the right. Pros and Cons Cartoon Animator's morph-based head system is ideal for animating photographic faces. It uses a semi 3D wire me