Animation and Video Life

To give you some idea of how long ago it was between buying this book and when I actually read it, the book makes a reference to the movie Jurassic Park being currently popular in theaters. When I read it, Jurassic World was owning theaters everywhere. Despite being published in the mid 1990s much of the information in Modus Operandi, a writer's guide to how criminals work by Mauro V. Corvasce and Joseph R. Paglino is still relevant - especially if you're writing anything set pre 1996 and want to be aware of how things were 20+ years ago.

Custom ToonMaker Character, iClone 6. Last post I introduced you to iClone 6 and my first full project using Reallusion's premiere 3D software animation tool. My project is a short promotional video for my Animation4Business service. As explained last time I actually sketched out a storyboard for this video (like actual hand drawn sketches) which is something I rarely need to do using animation tools like GoAnimate where it's just as easy to create the storyboard directly from the actual components that will be animated.

Late last year Reallusion released iClone 6 which was both great and annoying at the same time to me as I'd finally worked my way through the basics of iClone 5 after purchasing that the year before. Naturally I upgraded and promptly discovered my laptop running iClone 5 wouldn't run iClone 6. Reallusion did release a patch shortly after that enabled iClone 6 to run on my laptop but it basically scaled back the software so that you couldn't use any of the powerful new features.

I don't know of many books that focus specifically on writing narrative comedy so when I discovered The Cheeky Monkey, Writing Narrative Comedy by one of Australia's comedy legends, Tim Ferguson (international readers my know him better as one third of the comedy trio, the Doug Anthony All Stars ), I knew it was a book I'd buy.

JAC Once again it's been a while since I posted to this blog because... well... life happens and it's been tough to get back on track and into creation mode. Fortunately I haven't been totally non-productive and this post is to get you up to speed on where my CTA2 G2, JAC character is at, that I began documenting in part 1 of this series of posts. Last time I'd drawn my seven final character view sketches ready for importing into DrawPlus for 'inking' and coloring.

iClone Custom ToonMaker 2 Character. I've been looking around for a 3D modeling application for some time now after slowly making some headway into the world of 3D animation with Reallusion's iClone . iClone is great for 3D animation but much of the time you're a slave to whatever content you can buy from various online market places and libraries - which is pretty darn extensive I must say. However the one thing I can't buy is my own 2D character designs re-imagined as 3D characters. I can sort of make my own toon characters with Reallusion's ToonMaker and ToonMaker 2 but it's not quite the same. Whilst I'm not in a hurry to start cranking out 3D animation with my own characters it is something I'm interested in tinkering with now and then and I'd rather build my own characters.

Happy Cat JAC by TET It's been a while since I last posted to this blog, having been busy with moving house, organizing the new house and generally not doing anything in the way of my own animation projects to report on. When I left you I had announced that I was going to dive back into character creation for Crazy Talk Animator 2 by resurrecting the Monkey character that I started and abandoned a year earlier due to technical issues.