Skip to main content

New Look Toon - Learning Crazy Talk Animator 2

The Cast of New Look.
New Look is a new animated short that I created from a piece of comedy I wrote back in December of 1996. It's a very short sketch I created with a view to it being told as stand up comedy but I thought it was also an ideal piece to help me learn Crazy Talk Animator 2 (CTA2).

Watch the short video below then I'll go through some of the behind the scenes stuff to give you some idea of how it was made. Note that all of the artwork comes from CTA2  G2 Power Tools Volume 1 and that my goal was not to make a perfectly animated short. I know there's plenty of room to improve. This was entirely about learning the basics of the software.



The Script

As mentioned it was written by me in 1996 and is inspired by real life events where I actually did start a new job as a layout artist for a very big Supermarket Group. On several occasions different people did come up to me and say "You look a little lost!"

I wasn't but I must have paused long enough to appear less productive than everyone else or something. I only wished I had gone in one day and actually tried looking 'alarmed' just to see what reaction I'd get.

Storyboard

Most of the time I don't fully storyboard my own animation projects, since I don't usually need to show them to anyone, but this year I've decided to make more of an effort drawing proper storyboards I can actually understand. In the past my personal storyboards have been so bad I don't know what the squiggles mean even 5-10 minutes after I've drawn them.

Below is my storyboard for New Look minus all the scene description to save space. If you compare it to the finished animation you'll see all the shots are pretty much there as shown, with exception to an extra shot I created that appears between scene 3 and 4. It's a wide shot of the main character walking down a hallway that I added in because I didn't make scene 4 long enough to fill out the narration.

Storyboard for New Look.
All the rest of this article will reference the scene numbers shown in the storyboard above when talking about specific scenes.

Crazy Talk Animator 2 to MoviePlusX6

All of the scenes were animated as individual project files in CTA2. Although you could do an entire animation within the software it's really designed to be a scene editor. Once I completed each scene I exported it as an MP4 file and then brought it into Serif's MoviePlusX6.

Bringing the files into your video editing software gives you more options for adding titles, transitions and other effects as well as giving you more audio tracks to work with.

Prop Animation

Scene 1: I only wanted to highlight this scene because it's the only scene that is entirely prop and camera animation. It's not obvious but the building and trees at its base do slide slowly to the right just to give the scene a little more feeling of depth. If it weren't for characters, CTA2 would be a breeze to learn!

To make the camera slowly pan and zoom in is a simple case of putting a key frame for where you want the camera to begin and then putting another for where you want it to finish.

Backgrounds

Perspective View for scene depth.
One of the best things about CTA2 is the ability to give scenes, backgrounds perspective (or a feeling of depth). In my office scene, everything you see in the background is flat up against the back wall with very little depth. Everything in the foreground is set quite far forward so when the camera zooms in or out you get that nice parallax style effect that gives the scene a more three dimensional feel.

If however you don't want that effect, you can change the camera to 'orthographic' and the entire scene will be flat without having to adjust anything else.

Character Animation: Predefined and Custom Movement

You may notice that as the story unfolds the characters get more and more animated. That's why I felt this script was perfect for learning the basics. It starts with basic prop animation then the character animation gets progressively more complex.

The first scene that was a challenge was Scene 3. I thought having the character sitting at the desk, then turning to face the man who walks in, was going to be the hard part but I actually created that movement after about an hour of trial and error. It's a combination of predefined animation modified with my own enhancements to suit the situation.

The man who walks into the scene is also a combination of predefined animation (walking) and custom movements (when he extends his arm as he talks). Also I wanted him to carry something so it looked like he had purpose (to fetch a book) rather than just randomly walking into the scene empty handed.

Learning how to link the book to the character and then change his hand sprite so it looked like he was holding the book contributed to the complexity of his movement.

Speech

CTA2 has automatic lip syncing. It's not perfect but it's pretty good. Easy enough to refine the lip movement key frames too if anything is particularly not right. With CTA2 you can record your voice directly into the program, import audio or use Text To Speech (TTS).

Wherever a character actually speaks in my animation that sound was imported directly in CTA2. All the male characters use my own voice, the female is a TTS voice. The narration was imported into MoviePlus X6 and edited there.

Character Animation: Puppet

If you can't find a predefined character action to suit your needs, and you don't want to key frame something out, CTA2 allows you to puppeteer your characters in real time. You can control the character directly with the mouse (or trackpad) or indirectly through preset sliders for different body parts.

I didn't use puppeteering very much in this animation, except for scenes 8 and 11. In those scenes you can see the main characters head move up and down a very tiny amount relatively quickly as if he's laughing to himself. This was me literally moving the head up and down in real time as the movement was recorded.

Character Animation: Performance

Another handy feature of CTA 2 is the ability to save any sequence of character movement (including the audio for speech) out as a performance motion. Once you've saved it the motion can be applied to any other character.

In my animation I created the alarmed look in scene 9 from a combination of an existing pre-animated movement and my own customization (mostly the facial expressions, hand movements and positions). I then 'collected' the movement up and saved it as a performance motion file.

If you watch the two characters in scene 10 closely you'll notice they perform exactly the same movement as the character in scene 9, just offset a little to avoid their looks being synchronized.

Challenges

CTA2 can be quite confusing, specifically using the Timeline to locate movements that you wish to remove from a predefined motion. For example in scene 5 the main character has his feet up on the desk when you first see him. His hands are doing some rather odd, waving/flapping movements that are left over from the pre-animated motion file that I modified.

At the time I was creating this scene I looked everywhere to try and rid him of this hand movement. I just couldn't find it. Nor could I seem to get rid of it by moving his hands around. I still don't actually know how to fix it.

I have gotten much better at getting the characters to move how I want and putting together scenes much more quickly. For example, scene 3 took me the best part of a day to create. A few weeks and a bit more experience later I put together scenes 9-11 in a few hours.

I still have a lot to learn, particularly knowing the different parts of a character and how they relate to the timeline.

To Conclude

In general I'm happy with how this animation came out. I know anyone with even an ounce more animation experience than me will consider much of the animation to be awful. That's fine though. Everyone's first animations are always a bit dodgy and not something you usually want to dwell on. For me it was just a learning experience. I'll put more effort into what I produce when I'm more familiar with the software.

I'm not overly enthralled by the stock G2 characters that come with Power Tools Volume 1. I feel they lack a sense of style and some of the 360 degree views of them look and feel cobbled together and lazy. The characters are fine for business explainer videos perhaps but not something I'd want in my own personal animations. I'm looking forward to developing my own characters from my own artwork.

I'll continue to learn CTA2 from here. I feel it's a great and powerful tool, ideal for a one person animation studio. If you have this software I'd love to see what you're creating with it and reading articles like this one telling people about the challenges you faced.

Comments

  1. I actually love the waving hands in the 3rd scene---to me, it looked as if he was running his hands through his hair. It worked. Really, enjoyed this more reading through the blog post too, probably watched the animation a few times going back and forth to see what you were referring too. Overall, this was a fun animation to watch and listen too, but reading the blog and watching it makes you see what effort it takes to produce just 1 minute of animation. Excellent blog post. Looking forward to more.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In the end I just left the waving hand because, if nothing else, it makes the character look like he's doing something odd that would attract attention. Even with what I know now I still don't know how to stop him from doing it without starting his movements from scratch.

      Delete
  2. Truly, reveled in this all the more through the blog entry too, presumably viewed the liveliness a couple times about-facing and onward to see what you were alluding as well. By and large, this was a fun movement to watch and listen too, the web journal and viewing it attempts it takes to transform only 1 moment of activity. Incredible blog entry. Anticipating more.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

This blog is monitored by a real human. Generic or unrelated spam comments with links to sites of dubious relativity may be DELETED.

I welcome, read, and respond to genuine comments relating to each post. If your comment isn't that save me some time by not posting it.

Popular posts from this blog

Inochi2D - Free Open Source 2D VTuber Avatar Rigging and Puppeteering Software (Part 1)

Inochi2D Creator - Free Open Source VTuber Software. If you've been looking for a way to live perform as a 2D cartoon avatar on camera, whether it be for a live stream or for pre-recorded content like educational videos, then VTuber software is a low cost (or even no cost) option worth looking into. In my previous post, How to Become a VTuber - 2D and 3D Software for Creating and Controlling Your Avatar , I took a brief look at the relatively new but completely free and open source Inochi2D  which I thought showed great potential for my own needs of creating a live performance character rig for my own TET Avatar that I use for all my promotional materials. While it is possible to live perform my character using Cartoon Animator itself, Reallusion's MotionLive2D capture system isn't great - with lip sync in particular. More importantly though, I can't exactly teach people how to use Cartoon Animator if I'm using Cartoon Animator to control my Avatar. What is Inochi2D...

Learn Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 5 Fast by Creating Fun, 2D, Animated Christmas Holiday Messages - Free Course by The Lazy Animator

H ave you ever wanted to send your friends and family fun, 2D animated, holiday messages, or just create 2D animated characters that you can make move and talk without learning difficult to master animation skills or spending hours drawing frame by frame? Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 5 is a professional quality, 2D animation studio software that is also very easy to produce impressive results with, even if you've never animated before, or can't draw. Don't Have Cartoon Animator 5 Download a free, 30 day trial . Easy Beginner Course I've created a completely free beginners course that teaches you my fast, easy way to rig and animate your first 2D custom character in Cartoon Animator 5 without complicated templates or any drawing skills at all. My online video course includes everything you need, including eight AI generated character sprite graphics, and four AI generated Human voice samples, so you can start learning right away. Eight AI generated character image...

Krita AI Diffusion - Generative Image AI For Krita is Seriously Useful, Powerful and Free (If You Can Install it Locally)

Generative AI sequence of a woman in a business suit. From sketch to refined image using Krita AI Diffusion - by TET G enerative image AI, where you describe an image with a text prompt to an Artificial Intelligence model and it produces a new image based on your prompt, is gaining a strong hold as a tool for many artists. Krita AI Diffusion brings generative AI image tools right into your favourite free and opensource, graphics editor, Krita. Not only that, if you have a computer with decent specs (and at least 10GB of hard drive space), Krita AI Diffusion is completely free. What If I Don't Have a Powerful Computer? If you're in my situation, with a computer that was around before anyone in the mainstream had even heard of generative AI, you can still access Krita AI Diffusion for free, using a cloud based AI server, Interstice  and 300 tokens, to get you started. Once your initial tokens run out, purchase 5000 more for 10€ (approx US$11.00). Tokens never expire. I would...

Wonder Unit Storyboarder - Free Storyboarding Software for People Who Can (or Can't) Draw

Wonder Unit Storyboarder.  As an independent and solo animator I'm always tempted to try and skip storyboarding my animated shorts because they're usually only single scene sketch comedy type jokes. As a result I have many unfinished projects that kind of petered out due to having no clear finishing line. Storyboarding your productions, no matter how small, gives you a step by step guide of every shot that needs to be completed (no planning shots as you animate). It also allows you to create an animatic that gives you a rough preview of the finished production. In short, you shouldn't skip storyboards as they, generally, increase the chance of the project being completed. Disclaimer - I'm Not a Fan of Storyboarder Upfront, Wonder Unit's Storyboarder  is not my preferred storyboarding software. However it's completely free, has a number of very compelling featu...

The Ultimate Independent Animator's App and Resource List - Animation and Video Life

Image created with Cartoon Animator 4. Being an independent animator is not like a studio animation job. There's so much more to do that is indirectly related to the actual task of animating. Over the years I've sought out many apps, tools, and services that can help me achieve that one single task, expressing myself through animation. Below is my Ultimate Independent Animator's Resource List for 2024 (last updated Oct 2024). It started out as a list of free or low cost apps that could help you in every stage of producing either 2D or 3D animation, and then just kind of grew from there. You may not have been looking for a Time Management App as much as you needed something to get you started in 3D animation but when those commissioned projects start coming in you'll have a head start on maximizing your time. All the apps and services on this list had to meet two main criteria: They had to be useful and relevant to an Indy Animator/artist. The base app/se...

Glif (Alpha) - Make Your Own Tiny AI Powered Niche Image Generator Apps

I  first heard about Glif through a YouTube video that mentioned you could get access to Flux Pro (the latest 'game changer AI' generative image model) through the site for free. While I had a vague notion from the video of what Glif was, I wasn't expecting it to be so easy to get started with, and so good with my very first results. Glif is an easy to use, low-code platform for creating tiny AI-powered generators called Glifs. While that may not sound inspiring, what Glifs allow you to do is create a tiny app that niches down to a specific type of AI generation that the user modifies with their own inputs. The best way to really understand is with an example.  My First Glif I've recently been using VivaGo's AI platform  (free and unlimited at the time of writing) to consistently generate full body characters in a front facing T-Pose that I can rig as front facing characters in Cartoon Animator. Unfortunately it can be a bit hit or miss maintaining the T-Pose part...

LTX Studio (Beta): AI-Powered Visual Storytelling, From Script to Screen in One App.

LTX Studio can generate consistent characters across storyboard panels - even if one character is a dragon! W hile text to image, and text to video (and image to video) AI tend to be getting a lot of the press, the real exciting aspect of generative AI implementation is how it can be used to speed up creator workflow. Being able to realize your creative vision in a shorter length of time can lead to more ambitious projects. Particularly if you're a team of one, with a very limited budget, but you one day dream of creating your own epic animated feature film. LTX Studio (beta), a new 'all-in-one' AI film making tool, is not going to let you realize that dream from a single text prompt but, by bringing a bunch of generative AI technologies together, the developers have created a one platform workflow that can help anyone rapidly visualize and deliver a story from initial idea to finished film in days rather than weeks (depending upon how ambitious the project is). Even bette...