Animation and Video Life

Her addiction was the feeling of scoring a bargain. Image by Hugging Face Stable Diffusion Demo based on a prompt by David Arandle (TET). Far from being fearful of AI image generators like Dall.e 2 and Stable Diffusion I feel a new skill set is emerging for artists who embrace the technology. Chiefly among those skills is the ability to write 'quality' text inputs, and the ability to curate the best outputs i.e. images, if they are being fed into a bigger project or art piece. Case in point. One of my FB friends shared an article by Jesus Diaz,  AI was made to turn David Bowie songs into surreal music videos , in which YouTuber aidontknow fed the lyrics of Bowie's Space Oddity into Midjourney AI and then curated the resulting images into a video clip for the song (embed below).  While aidontknow says they used minimal changes to the lyrics, such as to clarify characters being spoken about in the song, from my experience you don't get quite that cohesive range of i...

Desert Scavenger G3, 360 Head. Creating G3, 360 character heads in Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 4 is something of a daunting task if you are working with a more detailed character head design. Your first attempt is bound to be a lot of trial and error. Mine certainly was and, in this article, I'm going to share with you what I learned. That said, this is not a tutorial. It's a run down of my experience creating a head for my own character. I've linked to Reallusion's video tutorials below. I chose to use a redesigned version of my G3 Desert Scavenger, Rey, Star Wars, parody character. Since the biggest part of her redesign was a completely new look head I thought now was a good time to try a more complex 360 head than my previous Color Monkey heads . The process of setting up a 360 head is not hard but there is a lot to take in. To prepare myself I went through Reallusions first eight video tutorials which cover almost every aspect of the 360 head creato...

Ma-Rey Sue - Now with 100% less head scarves and googles. Work continues on my Desert Scavenger, Star Wars parody character, Ma-Rey Sue. Last post I gave you the character's development background and current status. This week, I've continued to work on her and made some real progress.

Star Wars, Forces of Destiny Episode 1, Sands of Jakku. Disney recently began releasing episodes of its animated shorts series, Star Wars Forces of Destiny , which focuses each short story around one of the female heroes from the Star Wars Universe. At the time of writing four episodes were available on the Disney Youtube channel and they're okay. The stories are fairly simple and likely targeted at a younger audience in the 7-12 range. The animation style is fairly typical of modern, Saturday morning cartoons, with the characters being fairly faithful cartoon versions of their live action counterparts. The reason I'm making a cross face is because the first two episodes feature Rey protecting BB-8 from various nasties on Jakku. Specifically with BB-8 and Rey being chased through the desert before she finally puts a plan into action.

Aliens and Alien Societies - a writer's guide to creating extraterrestrial life-forms by Stanley Schmidt is another book that I originally bought almost 20 years ago and never got around to reading. However, now that I have a regular reading schedule I'm powering through books... comparatively, as opposed to not reading much at all... and I was really looking forward to reading this one. Science Fiction being one of my creative interests. Especially the possibility of creating my own unique worlds and populating them with any kind of alien I can dream up.

The Star Trek Fan is the second installment of an earlier animation I created back in March of 2013 called The Star Wars Fan . If you haven't seen it I would recommend you view it first as The Star Trek Fan is a kind of continuation of the dialogue but in a new subway location. Once again the Tourist, his travel companion Mia and their R2D2 unit are minding their own business when they are approached by a metro cop who inquires about their droid. With it being such a long time since the first installment I don't think I managed to get Mia's voice sounding the same or get any real difference between all of the character voices. Also the voices aren't consistent because I just wanted to get the animation finished, since it had been sitting in my GoAnimate account for months as I tinkered away on it between business animation clients. However I think it still works and the script is strong enough for people to overlook my poor voice work effort. The opening l...

Thought I'd take a diversion from animation this week and explore the other side of my blog's title, video. I recently discovered CineFix's YouTube channel with their home made movies. What impresses me most about them is their ambitious undertaking to recreate contemporary film scenes and film trailers using almost entirely 'in camera' effects. If you're not familiar with the term 'in camera' it means, what the film maker shoots with the camera is what you see in the final scene with nothing added. Batman Trilogy director, Christopher Nolan is very big on 'in camera' effects, often only using digital effects to remove things like boom arms and wires from the action so you can't see how a character or vehicle is flying through the air. What makes CineFix's productions so interesting is that they're obviously trying to recreate expensive movie scenes and special effects on a very low budget. Watch their recreation, shot fo...

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 ...

3D animation (of the polygon and texture map kind not the 3D glasses kind) is something I've wanted to get into ever since I saw the cut scenes created for the original Tomb Raider game back in 1996. I've embeded the opening cut scene to the first level of the game below. It looks quite primitive now but back then it was very cinematic for a game cut scene. It was the closest thing I'd seen to the possibility of making movies with strong characters directly on a home computer. The problem was that I never could afford a computer powerful enough to run the software 3D animation programs require. The system I had at the time could just barely run the Tomb Raider game in low resolution mode. Seemingly, every time I was able to buy a more powerful system, 3D animation software had progressed and required a system more powerful to run it. Because of this I eventually gave up on 3D animation as something that was accessible to me. Fast forward to the September 2012 r...

In late January of 2012 I was looking around for ideas to create an epic animated music video on GoAnimate that told a story of a battle against the odds. Inspiration... This came about as a result of re-viewing, yet again,  one of my favorite GoAnimations of all time created by GoAnimator,  Tripfold , called The Jet Set Concussion (The Blueberry Fiz Contention 2). I've embeded it below. It still stands up as a great GoAnimation even now. The Jet Set Concussion by Tripfold on GoAnimate Animated Presentations - Powered by GoAnimate. It's an old animation (published in October of 2009) that tells a love story of our hero of sorts in the face of aliens hell bent on destroying the world. I like it because of how it tells the story with no dialogue. How it uses music to set the pace of the action and that it features plenty of detail and subtle animation techniques, not really seen on GoAnimate at the time (such as paralax movement of objects to give a feeling o...

Xtranormal's online studio is a good way to take a break from the challenges of visualizing a complete script to just focus on a single scene with dialogue. So that's what I do from time to time. The Robotz theme characters are actually a collection of retro constructed robots made from hardware that seems to be mostly pre-1980 back to very early twentieth century. In this sketch the very latest in World Domination Robots reports for duty in some large industrial type complex of the future (I think the set is actually the bridge of a space craft). It's not long before he realizes he's not as impressive as he first thought. The idea for this sketch is really just me messing about. I like the idea of contrasting grand ideas with the intricacies of every day life. Who really cares if you're the latest in World Domination Robots if it's peace time and you have a broken toaster? Although Xtranormal looks deceptively easy there's actually more wo...

Over the 2011 Christmas break I started work on Men In Black 2 - Part 6 unaware that GoAnimate's license for the Super Rica and Rashy theme would expire on January 1, 2012. Had I known the theme was going to expire, I would have not only fast tracked this episode, I would also have fast tracked part 7 - which will be the final episode of the series. Thanks to GoAnimate's CEO, Alvin Hung, who allowed this episode to be published despite containing a character (Rashy) from a discontinued license. If you're not yet familiar with the series then check out MIB2 - Part 1 to catch up on the story. Essentially it's a parody of the MIB films with President Obama playing the Will Smith role but the story is my own original script. For those of you up to speed, knowing that Sock Monkey, Rashy, is an Evil Genius and a master of disguise, below is Part 6 for your enjoyment. In this episode we see Rashy's diabolical scheme unfold with disastrous results... Pt6 - Men ...

This installment, part 4 of my parody series, Men In Black 2 , Rashy's disguise once again doesn't fool Agent Obama and the chase is on but who really has the upper hand? Find out in the video below. Pt4: Men in Black 2 by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! Spoiler Alert: Make sure you've watched the episode before reading further! Initially this whole episode was going to be Barack and Joe chasing Rashy. I wanted there to be lots of action and comedy in the style of many cartoon chases you see, such as the classic 'hallway of doors' where the pursuer and those in pursuit run between numerous doors across a hallway, almost impossibly emerging from different doors each time. Then, as I thought about the episode more, as a viewer I'd be disappointed with a long, drawn out chase scene where the story doesn't really progress. Plus I already kind of did the same thing in the first Men In Black series wi...

My Men In Black, episode 2, parody series continues in these latest two installments where Agents Obama and Biden, having seen through Rashy's clever Newt Gingrich disguise, are now hot on his trail. In part 2 we see the return of Rashy's reluctant, double crossing partner in crime and what could be better than seeing a democrat firing off a few hundred rounds from a big gun! Pt2: Men in Black 2 by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! Then in part 3 not everyone is happy with Agent Barack's skill with a rifle whilst Rashy forgets his 'guest' status and clearly over stays his welcome. Agents Obama and Biden seek solace in a few after work drinks and Rashy regroups with yet another cunning disguise. Pt3: Men In Black 2 by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! Neither of these parts have much to report behind the scenes. Everything is mostly stock standard GoAnimate born ...

GoAnimate recently launched it's new US Election 2012 theme with a stylish set of new characters reminiscent of newspaper editorial cartoons. You can check the characters out right away by clicking the above link which will take you to the GoAnimate Quick App for the theme. Making your first Election 2012 animation is as simple as following the four step process in the quick app. If you want to make something a little more advanced you'll need to choose the Full-Featured App option which will fire up the GoAnimate studio. For me the new theme is an excellent reason to fire up a second episode of my popular Men In Black series  from a year or so ago. The premise is that Barack Obama is nearing the end of his term as President and, as a particularly gifted MIB agent who can see through disguises, he spots the Evil Genius Sock Monkey, Rashy (from the first episode), posing as Republican Candidate, Newt Gingrich. Watch part 1 below. Future parts of this episode w...

I've been in something of a creative funk in terms of creating GoAnimations of late. I had quite a few unfinished projects in my account holding me back from starting anything new. Wanting to finish things that I had started but lost a lot of enthusiasm for was really getting to me because I don't like to quit on ideas once they've started to take shape. Finally I decided that enough was enough and it was time to cut these ideas loose. However looking through them, I thought there were some ideas that had potential and it would be a shame to just delete them. I also noticed I still had my partially finished and unused third Bat Storm trailer. Since I did spend some time working on these ideas I thought it might be interesting to show them off in a kind of 'deleted scenes' style animation. To that end I've put together 'Unused and Unfinished'. A collection of scenes from all my unfinished works that I've decided to discontinue. Unused and Unfi...

Animation site Xtranormal is having a Summer Movie Contest  with a $1000 first prize and they also just released a new set of Star Trek themed characters and backgrounds called Trekkiez . I decided to combine the two into this blog post by featuring their new characters in my Summer Movie Contest entry below. If you enjoyed the above animation then I'd really appreciate it if you took a moment to visit the animations Youtube Page to click the Youtube 'Like' Button under the video . The top ten most liked videos will all win a prize. As mentioned, first prize is US$1000, with second prize being an iPad 2 and third an iPod Touch (any of which I'd be happy to win but first would be awesome). The competition ends at the end of July 2011. Long time fans of my online animations may find the theme and script of the above animation some what familiar. That's because I based it upon the ideas that feature in the script of my original GoAnimate, Star Trek Quogs seri...

Ever since the introduction of the the import video feature for GoPlus users of GoAnimate people have thought about the possibility of creating Roger Rabbit style animations, combining live action people with cartoon characters. I first attempted this when the video import feature was introduced with my animation TET's PA Video Test . In that animation I simply overlaid cartoon elements and characters in front of the video. It worked reasonably well. However to truly combine live action people with cartoon characters you need to be able to place the cartoon background and characters behind the live action video as well. To do that you need either a blue or green screen to combine the cartoon and video together in a technique known as chroma keying (more commonly referred to as 'green screen' or 'blue screen'). Watch my test video below to see my completed example using GoAnimate. Note that I recorded the video with a really short time frame to get it done so ...