Animation and Video Life

Xtranormal is an animation site that claims if you can type, you can make movies . It's a bold claim but it certainly delivers with its online 'text to movie' animation studio. I would liken the experience to writing a twitter conversation where the status update box is shaped like a speech balloon. You simply select which character is speaking, write their dialog in the balloon, then add the next speech balloon to the list for the next (or even the same character) to say something. In fact if you keep log files of your various online conversations you could use Xtranormal to turn them into movies. Once you've entered all your dialog, click the preview button and you can see your animation come to life using fairly detailed 3D characters and sets. All the camera angles will be automatically selected and I have to say the automated camera works pretty well. The shots it chooses do make your animation look like a professional movie. It's not always perfect bu...

After my recent success in GoAnimate's Creating for a Cause competition I hadn't planned to enter their next official competition. However when it was announced that the theme was to create a trailer for a Summer Blockbuster (for a real movie or even a completely fictional one) I felt this was the perfect excuse to play around with my Bat Storm cast without having to write a script. Up until now I've resisted ripping audio from popular Youtube memes and creating my own GoAnimate interpretation because often I watch this kind of video by other GoAnimators and feel a little disappointed. Only because it feels like that person is riding on the success of someone else's content. It's kind of silly really because just about every animation at GoAnimate is a mash up of other peoples content. Why should mashing in an audio track make any difference? Having got over that I decided, wouldn't it be cool to see my Bat Storm cast interpret the audio from the officia...

Working on the first episode of my upcoming Bat Storm animation I discovered that GoAnimate didn't really have any suitable Police Car props. There were a few poorly cropped .jpg images in GoAnimate's community props section and a really awesome but stationary police car by GoAnimator, SolarBaby , but nothing suitable for a police chase. After making an animated motorcycle for Demon Biker I figured, how hard could an animated Police car be? Rather than go for my local police car style I thought I'd go for the more recognisable Dodge Police car that's been seen in so many movies and TV shows during the nineteen seventies, eighties and even early nineties. Unfortunately I couldn't find a good side view of a Dodge Police car to trace so I ended up tracing this image of a Dodge Nova and converting it into a four door Police Dodge, based on other images of Police Dodges I had. Finally to demonstrate my animated, custom Police car I created this short GoAnimate ca...

GoAnimate recently went through some major upgrades that has given more users access to uploading flash animated props. Unfortunately if you're not able to purchase Adobe CS5 or even the cheaper flash animation alternatives like Koolmoves there isn't a lot of great free flash animation software out there. In fact Pencil Animator , which I've reviewed before , is pretty much it. Whilst it may not have all the bells and whistles of even the lower end commercial flash software products, is quite buggy and prone to crashing, it's still pretty powerful. In fact it can hold its own with the quality of the flash it produces when in capable hands. Considering Pencil Animator is quite easy to learn, it's own manual leaves a lot to be desired, making the program seem more complex than necessary. If you just want to know enough to make great props and backgrounds for your GoAnimate animations then this is where I come in. The animation below demonstrates an animated ca...

In a some what futile effort to get my partner, Enigma, interested in GoAnimate I created a GoAnimate Custom Character based on her Facebook profile avatar. That's her avatar image on the right and in the image below is Enigma Sunshine, the character - whom was also named by my partner. The character is actually meant to have green eyes, as in the avatar picture, but for some reason in the final animation the pupils show up black. My partner spends a lot of time on Facebook so it's not hard to see where the inspiration for Engima Sunshine being a Facebook 'socialite' comes from. I'm not a big fan of online social networks myself. I'd call myself a 'reluctant' participant. Particularly when it comes to real time chat. I prefer the old style message board forums to live chat (or even Twitter for that matter). I found coming up with a script for the first episode of Enigma Sunshine fairly difficult as result. In fact, to try and find some inspiration...

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...