The Dork Knight Remade in CrazyTalk Animator 3 - Revisiting a TET Original Animated Short

The Dork Knight was one of the very first animations I created in 2008 on the then very new GoAnimate (now known as Vyond) website and animation studio. At the time it was featured as a Staff Pick and spawned two 'sequel' animated shorts.

A very loose parody of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, The Dork Knight reimagines Bruce Wayne as a preteen nerd who thinks he can be a superhero. This version of the character is rich enough to have a butler (Alfred) but lives a more suburban lifestyle with his 'Batcave' being his mother's garage.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, over the years I've bought probably thousands of dollars of CrazyTalk Animator content packs that I've barely used. I really want to do more animation that doesn't take months to complete and is just made for the fun of telling a story.

Remaking my old GoAnimation shorts is something for years I thought would be a fun challenge so I finally decided to give it a shot. Rather than use my own original artwork it seemed fitting to 'kitbash' a remake together with my CTA content library, keeping the spirit of the original GoAnimations which are a 'kitbash' of GoAnimate's content library.

My two goals for The Dork Knight remake were; recreate the animation as closely as possible using primarily characters and props from my own CTA content library, and, get it done as quickly as possible.

If you're curious to watch the original you'll find it here. However the new version below is much better and almost a shot for shot copy of the original scenes - you're really only missing out on having to read the dialogue in speech balloons, as the early GoAnimate studio wasn't capable of uploading voices or sound of any kind.



I'm very happy to say this animation only took about a week to create, leaving me hopeful that I could certainly create more of these short projects more often.

Figure 1: Scene comparison. Top is
the original GoAnimate Scene.

Whilst the animation is far from an exact copy, the spirit of each scene is there. If you compare the 'Batcave' scene from the original (see figure 1), at a glance it's fairly close.

You'll notice the new Alfred character has lost considerable weight. Largely because I didn't have a character in my library that looked anything like the original GoAnimate version.

Highlights of the new version include:

• Being able to fully animate the characters rather than use the pre-animated actions of the original characters.
   
• The characters now speak their lines instead of using speech balloons.
   
• There are a lot more cartoon sound effects for reactions and other moments. Something that wasn't possible when I made the original in GoAnimate's studio.
   
• New background music.
   
• Also note that Dorkman's cowl is made from combining existing props in my CTA library (the ears, for example, are rotated gun holsters), whereas in the original it was a fully custom prop.

As I said, I hope to do more projects like this, whether it be recreating old GoAnimations or creating entirely new projects. It's a lot of fun just noodling around in my content library and seeing what I can put together - plus it gives me the chance to showcase what you can do with CTA if you're someone who doesn't draw but wants to tinker around with telling stories through animation.