Animation and Video Life

Ryu Will Fall is a throw back to old school GoAnimating. There's no custom backgrounds or props and I've used speech balloons with no sound other than a music backing track. The basic pr emise is Sakura is in love with Ryu (of the Street Fighter Games) and she has her sights set on capturing his heart. Hence the 'Fall' part of the title is not meant to be literal. I must admit I'm in a bit of a slump as far as GoAnimate goes so I decided to try one of the badge challenges (Ryu's Monologue) just to animate something. The badge challenge has some fairly strict limitations. You can only use Ryu as a character and there is no mixing of themes. Fortunately there was a prop image of Sakura so I was able to use that rather than her actual animated character. The music track is the same music I used in my Escape animation . None of the existing Street Fighter game tunes seemed appropriate and none of the GoAnimate classic tunes were available without mixing th...

I came across Magisto's new 'Magical video editing in a Click' site via Mashable's article, Automated Video Editing Site Makes Movie Magic Out of Raw Footage . If the above two link titles don't give you a clue about what this new start up site does then I'll elaborate. The purpose of the site is to take a bunch of raw camera footage (i.e. unedited, direct from your camera footage) and, using the sites built in subject recognition algorithms, produce a finished, professionally edited, short video with an audio music track that you can share with your family, friends and other people in your online social networks. The site is not targeted at the the video professional and is definitely not designed for long format video. Rather it's for the average person filming short grabs of live video such as clips of the family, places traveled to, family pets etc. who wouldn't normally take the time to edit that kind of footage together. Thus often post...

Harry Partridge Interviewed by Animation Aficionados  in a recent (August 18, 2011) podcast interview that goes into some detail about Harry's work, techniques and inspirations. Well worth listening to, although it could have done with either some editing down or, as Harry points out, more explanation for the audience about some of the things being talked about. However, people who've seen Harry's GoAnimate video may like to listen to the first 10-15 minutes for Harry's commentary on GoAnimate and the motivation behind his animation, which reaffirms his indifference to GoAnimate as he stated on Newgrounds in his animation description : For the record I am indifferent to the software. I have no problem with people wanting to create animation with it for fun as long as those with loftier ambitions aren't letting their skills stagnate. I spent a lot of time with 3D movie maker as a kid because I didn't know how else I could create animation and I really wis...

One of the ideal uses for a website like GoAnimate is creating animations based upon comments, feedback and conversations online. The kind of thing you just wouldn't sit down and spend months animating - well, maybe, if you're from Ardman Animations  scouting for a new season of Creature Comforts  you might - but for the rest of us... probably not. However, just for a bit of fun with your friends or simply for your own amusement, animating an online discussion or comment is one of the things GoAnimate can do well without taking months away from more important animation projects. Here's a recent GoAnimatation I did of an email reply I received about my post, Harry Partridge, GoAnimate, What I Observed . I did send this person an actual email reply that, after thanking him for his comment, opened with the line written at the end of the animation. The exchange of emails did lead to a slightly more interesting and coherent discussion than is presented here but the c...

Xtranormal, Star Trek Entry Summer Movie Contest. To begin, I'd like to thank all of you that took the time to vote for and Youtube 'Like' my entries in Xtranormal's Summer Movie Contest and the Sydney Opera House's Graphic Contest . Thanks to your efforts I managed to place a very respectable seventh place in Xtranormal's contest - where the top ten most Liked entries received a prize. Seventh won me 2000 Xtranormal points - which I think equates to about US$20.00 in real money if I had to buy those points. Still, you can do a lot with 2000xp on Xtranormal so it was great to have even placed when I thought I'd be lucky to squeak in at tenth. You can see all the winners on Xtranormal's blog . GoAnimate SOH Graphic Competition Entry. I wasn't quite so fortunate with the Sydney Opera House's Graphic Contest. My entry was accepted into the first round alongside about 53 other entries. Unfortunately I don't know if I got enough...

July 1992 Edition, CU Amiga Featuring Amy the Squirrel. American Cartoonist, Eric W. Schwartz , (whose unofficial Amiga Icon, Amy the Squirrel, is pictured on the July 92 edition of CU Amiga cover on the right) is my only real animation hero. Sure there are the big names like Disney , Chuck Jones , Tex Avery and even Preston Blair whose influences can all be seen in my own cartoons but Eric did what none of the others could. He showed that really great 2D computer animation was within my reach with little more than an Amiga Computer , a copy of Deluxe Paint and Moviesetter . This was at a time when computer based animation was in its infancy (outside of computer game animation) and Flash was something that lights did. There were many great Amiga artists but Eric was really the only one consistently making very funny, traditional style animations. His humor and drawing style is heavily influenced by classic Warner Brothers and Disney cartoons but he managed to build on this, ...

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...