Animation and Video Life

GoAnimator Smirks is the May winner of my GoAnimate, Get Featured in TET's Blog contest . Smirks has had his account with GoAnimate since August of 2011 and in that time has amassed 2969 followers (formerly known as fans) and published 60 animations. Smirks chose to feature a music video, Shooting Star by Owl City, saying... I chose shooting star because it's one of my most inspirational video i have made, and because i think it's the best video i have made (skill wise). Shooting Star by Smirks on GoAnimate Inspiration... I was inspired to make it because I've noticed all the people, who are saying that they get picked on and saying that they are worthless (and believe me I have been there), and the song to me felt like it was saying that people can have their chance to shine anytime, so because of that I decided to make it. Main Challenge... The main problem making the video was the masking, like at the scene where it shows the 4 characters in the s...

It's been approximately two years since I completed Bat Storm, Episode 1: Financial Crisis and finally the first part of Episode 2 is here. Bat Storm, Episode 2: Pain, continues from Episode 1. Super Charge is still undermining Bat Storm's efforts to fight crime and Detective Smith is still unhappy with any Superhero doing police work. Impressed by the Jokester's business model of look-a-like employees Bat Storm has started to expand his party appearance business with new look-a-like employees of his own. Meanwhile the Mayor's office has experienced several attempted break ins by a masked thief and Bat Storm takes it upon himself to apprehend the repeat offender. E2/Pt1 Bat Storm: Pain by etourist on GoAnimate Behind the scenes, I never intended to take this long to release Episode 2. In fact the original intention of the Bat Storm series was to write and release each episode quickly, within weeks of each other, until I had completed a series of six 24...

I realized that over the course of the last year or so I've started a number of projects in this blog and haven't really got back to them so I thought I'd give you an update on where things are at. Bat Storm, Episode 2 Last year I announced I was working on Bat Storm, Episode 2 , with an expected release date of August 2012. Obviously that didn't happen. For various reasons I had to shelve the project. The main one being me becoming some what frustrated with the direction things were going. I think I started to get a little too ambitious and I also didn't like having a script written in advance. I never wrote a script for Episode 1 , the story just evolved organically as I animated it. That's what really held my interest and pushed me to finishing it. I wanted to know how it ended. Recently I've released new Bat Storm, Episode 2 images onto my Facebook page because I've started working on it again. At the time of writing I have a full two min...

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...

TotallyEpicHD GoAnimator TotallyEpicHD  is the April winner of my GoAnimate, Get Featured in TET's Blog contest . TotallyEpicHD has had an account with GoAnimate since April of 2010 and in that time has amassed 757 fans and published 17 animations. TotallyEpicHD chose to feature a music video, Elvis Presley's Hound Dog, saying... I chose Hound Dog because it was probably my best animation skill wise (rather than popularity) and the feed back that I got from it was very pleasant and made me confident to represent my work. Keep reading after the video for more of TotallyEpicHD's behind the scenes commentary. Hound Dog by TotallyEpicHD on GoAnimate Animated Presentations - Powered by GoAnimate. Inspiration... I was inspired to make it because my two dogs are small, and people call them the "guard dogs" as an ironic joke, and I also felt like making a music video, so, those two combined, I came up with that. Main Challenge... The main problem...

Original Cool Froyd Painting. Acrylic on Canvas 2009 Cool Froyd is an original character painting (image right) that I created in 2009 based on a sketch I drew back in 1999. Since buying Crazy Talk Animator Pro I've thought Cool Froyd would be a good candidate for turning into an animated web series. Nothing too complex. I picture him as a kind of animated cat vlogger giving his views on any subject you can imagine in short 1 or 2 minute episodes. The following blog post documents my journey so far of turning a painting into an animation. I'm not going to go through every step in detail. This is just an overview of the process. Fitting the character skeleton. One thing I have become very familiar with is the character creation process of Crazy Talk Animator Pro (from here on in to be known as CTA). The easiest way to start is with a photo image imported into the Actor Creator to get your basic character skeleton (or bones in most other software terminology). N...

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 ...