Animation and Video Life

Stylish Stick Figures by TET. Animating stick figures is almost a right of passage for any animator who has ever made an old fashioned flipbook or discovered the free stickman animator app, Pivot Animator . There's also the hugely popular viral stick figure animation, Animator Versus Animation  and its sequels by Alan Becker that continue to inspire variations more than 12 years later. Back when Vyond was GoAnimate they had a stick figure theme that was popular site wide despite having many other themes with much more refined Saturday morning cartoon style characters. I even had my own stick figure series, Harry Chalk , on GoAnimate. Long story short, I was looking through the Reallusion Cartoon Animator Marketplace and discovered there really weren't any well designed, traditional looking stick figure characters. That's not to say there weren't any at all but I wanted something similar to GoAnimate's stick figures which included full facial features and male and...

A lot of first time video digital camera owners don't have access to a tripod and vary what their camera films through their own natural movement when filming a scene (and going overboard with the zoom function). However once they start to learn technique and story telling they soon discover that fixed (usually tripod camera mounted) shots with minimal use of panning the camera and using the zoom function are how stories are more conventionally told through the lens. On GoAnimate the camera is replaced by the scene stage and how it is framed using the CUT, PAN and ZOOM frame tools. Whilst this article is focused on GoAnimate, the principle applies to almost any film medium. Below are two videos of the same 'Where's your Helmet?' joke animation. The first uses a single, fixed camera shot to film the entire scene, with a panning shot at the end (which is needed so as not to spoil the joke). The second uses variable (or multiple) camera shots to tell the same joke. T...

In this tutorial I show you how to recreate a GoAnimate  Stick figure character in order to create your own animated custom stick figure movements with Koolmoves . In the process you'll learn about the role of 'tweens' and put the tiniest of nicks into learning action script so you can stop your animation from continuously looping. You'll need to have seen at least my first Koolmoves tutorial in order to set up your GoAnimate Character/Prop template file. The second tutorial is optional but will give you an overview of the drawing tools (if you are not familiar with them) and show you the first action you should animate with any completely custom character. All three parts of tutorial three are embeded below with some additional notes to let you know what each section contains. I know these tutorials are quite long, and I've tried to make them as interesting to watch as possible, but, if animating were easy, quick and simple... well we wouldn't have any n...

Harry Chalk 3 - Matt Fights Back continues on from Harry Chalk 2 - Bill's Revenge . Bill's supernatural powers have enabled him to free himself from the confines of the black board world. Now he's continuing his pursuit of Matt who broke every stick in Bill's body in Harry Chalk 1 - Secret Agent . Harry Chalk 3 - Matt fights back by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! I was reading my previous post on Harry Chalk 2 and was reminded that the whole reason I started this series was to do a really cool stick figure fight - which I've yet to do in the series. Ahem... well, I guess I failed miserably with this episode on that goal. However I hope I still delivered with a cool story. Previously I've voiced every character myself in this series but with Sally White having so many lines my really poor female voice (that you can hear in Harry Chalk 2) just wasn't up to the task. Thankfully GoAnimator,  Rocque , answer...

Pimp My Ride is a short and quick animation I made to showcase my mini van, flash made prop (made with Pencil Animator ) and how to use the prop with the Stick Figure car. The idea for the joke is that Bob is the master mechanic but he spends so much time working on cars he really doesn't have time for things like picking up girls. He just doesn't have any concept of what girls would find cool in a car... Pimp my ride - new van prop by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! I made the van for the final installment of episode 1 of my Bat Storm series but I just couldn't be bothered trying to animate the wheels with Pencil Animator. You literally have to draw every frame by hand and I didn't want to spend the time when I could use some perfectly good animated wheels from the stick figure car and get the same result in no time at all (thus proving that GoAnimators sometimes are a bit lazy!). The second installment came about...

Bat Storm's Bitter Sweet Moment is my second collaboration with Cartoon King a.k.a. Mathieu Leader (the first being Undead and Unemployed ). Matt really wanted to write a Bat Storm story so I said okay. It's fair to say Matt and I did quite a bit of back forthing over the script with a couple of re-writes. The problem we had initially was Matt was writing for Batman not Bat Storm with a script that was actually too large for Bat Storm's world. Which is something any aspiring writer should take note of. If you're going to write for someone else's characters you need to learn who those characters are. Matt scaled it back and came up with this story about Bat Storm's past as an unsuccessful small time thief. Bat Storm: Bat's Bitter Sweet Moment by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! The first thing you may have noticed is that the title refers to this episode as 'Alternate Universe'. This is something...

Where's Your Helmet?  is a short animation I made to accompany a post I wrote on my main blog titled "Life's Tough, Get a Helmet" - Literally! Both the post and this animation are inspired by the quote "Life's tough, get a helmet" and both are humorous ideas about the thought that what if we took 'getting a helmet' literally. You might think there's not really a lot of behind the scenes stuff to talk about on such a simple looking animation... and you'd be right. However that really is the point. After creating so many fairly complex animations I thought I'd set myself a goal of doing something really simple. Just a simple script and a sparse execution. Make it all about the joke and not about the animation. I also wanted to create it as fast as possible. Although it probably looks like I only spent ten minutes putting this animation together it was actually closer to two hours including coming up with the joke. Animat...

Almost as soon as I finished the first Harry Chalk I knew that the animation would end up being a series. In fact I remember thinking, crap! I've started another series. The original has been sitting within GoAnimate's top nine animations of all time for four months now and spent several weeks of those months in the number one spot. It has been viewed more than 11,850 times. Not bad for a small side project. To get some idea of Harry's popularity I released Harry Chalk 2: Bill's Revenge on May 25th, 2010 and, five days later it's sitting at number 2 in GoAnimate's top animations of all time. That's a record for any of my animations. In this new adventure Mathew is learning the history of John F. Kennedy's assassination which prompts him to imagine Harry escorting the Presidential motorcade. Things kind of progress from there. Harry Chalk 2 Bill's Revenge by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! As y...