Animation and Video Life

Demon Biker is technically my second GoAnimate Flash character after Kung Fu Cat since I started work on him before I started work on Hoot . However with Demon Biker being much more complex, Hoot was released first. Designed by GoAnimator, Charles Zippel , I offered to turn his bitmap, GoAnimate prop 'stop motion' style character into a a true Flash animated character because I saw it as a natural progression from Kung Fu Cat. Charles' character was slightly more detailed but not by too much. There was also the challenge of creating and animating the characters motorbike as well. Charles' original animation demonstrating his character is embeded below. Biker Demon (New Character) (new tag) by CharlesZippel Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! Just like Kung Fu Cat I used Koolmoves to create my Flash animated version of Demon Biker. Although the character took longer than Kung Fu Cat I did find him easier going as I had learned ...

I stumbled across this video series by Tim Hodge which he put together for web site eHow in which he gives short glimpses into the world of the professional animator. Tim Hodge is a writer, director and animator in Nashville, Tenn. He worked for many years as an animator and story artist with Walt Disney Feature Animation. His most recent work includes writing and directing several entries in the popular Veggie Tales animated program.   I describe the videos as 'glimpse' because each one is quite short and briefly touches on the topic of the title without going into it in any real depth. However as a series it makes for a good insight into the career of a professional animator.   As someone who is learning traditional style animation using flash the first video in the series I watched was Episode 12: How to create a walking animation (embeded below). Despite having access to many examples of how to make a character walk I seem to struggle making my own charac...

Hoot the Owl and his Wisdom Tree are a creation of GoAnimator, TheseStars . I'm not sure if I just happened across her first animation of Hoot or if she asked me to watch but in any case I liked the idea a lot. I thought the idea of using GoAnimate to share a love of anagrams was both original and a great use of the site. The only problem was, in TheseStars original animation Hoot and his tree was just a static drawing. (a still from the original is shown below) . This wasn't very engaging to look at in the sense that it wasn't animated - something you would expect on an animation site. I had a feeling the character would have much more appeal if some movement was added. I was in the middle of working on Harry Chalk 2 but, looking at the drawing of Hoot I thought I could probably make an animated version with the most necessary basic moves very quickly. So that's what I set out to do. In the space of an evening I had created (in flash using Koolmoves ) Hoot...

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...

GoAnimate has been beta testing a new feature that allows you to add video objects to your animation. More about that in a moment. Just prior to the video feature's release to GoAnimate beta testers I made an animation called 'Moonlighting - TET's New PA'. The premise being Jim Benton's Happy Bunny, from my GoAnimate Complaints Department , series decides to take a job moonlighting as my personal assistant. The idea came about as I way to humorously inform my fans of the status on some of my on going series projects like MIB and Harry Chalk as well humorously look at some of the problems of being a popular GoAnimator. Moonlighting - TET's New PA by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! There's not much more that needs to be said about the above animation. It's basically the GoAnimate Complaints Department in a new setting with a trap door. I discovered GoAnimate's new video upload feature on GoAnimate...

It's golf but not quite as expected. Greg and Mr Usaji are having a quiet game of golf when suddenly Greg's ball starts to move all by its self. This short animation was put together fairly quickly to give my Domo Animate fans, who had been asking when my next Domo animation was coming out, something new from me. It's a rare occasion that I use anything other than Domo characters in a Domo animation but when I came up with the idea for this I was experimenting with the stick figure theme on DomoAnimate. I imagine this could be how Mr Usaji first met Domo. Domo Golf by etourist Like it? Create your own at DomoNation.com . It's free and fun! People have asked me how I made Domo's shell break away when hit by the club. It's a simple slight of hand effect. Domo is still in the egg but hidden by a grass coloured circle that moves along the same path as the shell. Then a different 'flying' domo is used to distract your attention. I would have li...

Koolmoves is professional flash animation software at a budget price and is a great alternative to Adobe's Flash Professional CS5 . At less than one twelfth of the price of Adobe's offering it's a great introduction for flash noobies to dip their toe into the water to see if it's for them without the pressure of a serious investment in software. It's also great for people like me who only need a fraction of the software's capabilities. The cost of CS5 is unjustifiable whilst the cost of Koolmoves is a good investment should you discover you want to do more at a later time. I bought Koolmoves back in February and I've now had some time to test it out. As I said I only needed a fraction of what this software can do so as a result I can only comment on what I've used. However if you want to program fully capable, flash web sites or make stand alone flash movies and cartoons then Koolmoves certainly appears to have everything you need. Me... I just wa...