Today was a good day. Let me list a few of the reasons:
Continue reading For the folks who aren’t Flash animators but would like to see a little bit of my process when animating, skip down and watch the movie that I link to below. Starting at around 4 minutes in you can see an example of how I animate one of my characters in a simple motion.
Anyone who’s followed my blog so far and read the entries on Flash commands (not sure if there’s anyone like that yet – I have an admittedly small audience) will have seen me mention the Autotweener. Well, today’s the day – I’m going to tell you all about it and post it for download.
The autotweener is a tool that does many of the same things as Flash’s built-in motion and shape tween functions, but it works in a fundamentally different way. It’s incredibly useful, simplifying tasks that used to be difficult or impossible. For my own animation process it was revolutionary – it totally changed how I do things. I now rarely use motion tweens and even more rarely shape tweens – the autotweener has taken over almost all the tasks I used to use those for.
I’m not generally big on new year’s resolutions but this year I kinda made one. Well, I don’t really think of it as a resolution – more of a goal. I set the goal for myself to do at least fifteen minutes of animation every day. It’s a really short period of time, but I figured that if I could get myself to do that much, even if I’m busy, I’d at least be doing something. And then once I’m actually sitting in front of the computer, I might as well work longer, right? At least, that’s how it works out more often than not.
I haven’t been totally successful in my goal but I think it’s fulfilled its purpose so far. For the most part, I sit down and work on Don’t Fear the Sitter every evening. I usually try to do more than fifteen minutes, because that seems like such a limited period. I can’t actually get much done in that amount of time.
And so, after kind of stagnating for most of last year, I’m working on my thesis again. Now I think I’m back on track to finish the film by the summer of 2011, making it about a six-year project. Yikes. But it feels good to be chipping away at it again.
Here’s an example of the kind of thing I’m accomplishing. I finished animating this scene a few days ago:
There’s a lot of animation out there on the internet and, honestly, most of it is terrible. Everyone’s gotta start somewhere, though, so I don’t begrudge people their learning process. I just hope that it is, in fact, a learning process. If you really enjoy making animation then you should make an effort to get better at it. Animation (and art in general) is one of the most demanding fields in terms of how much you have to learn and practice in order to break into it professionally. Most people will spend many years practicing their drawing and learning the principles of animation before they’ll be able to do it well enough for someone to pay them.
So, in my fantasy that you, the reader, are an aspiring animator, I’d like to give you something to consider: Secondary animation.
I’ve been working for the last few days on the Mom model and tonight I finished the front view. Mostly. I realized right at the end that I really should add in some jewelry — particularly some dangly diamond earrings. She’s supposed to be a classy trophy wife on her way to the opera or some other high-class function, so of course she’d have some diamonds. Now the next trick is to figure out how to make a diamond sparkle in Flash. I’ve got some ideas. We’ll see if they work.
I discovered recently that the fine folks at Macromedia introduced a rather annoying bug into Flash 8. When copying from Flash 8 to (apparently) any other vector-based drawing program some or all of the control points are lost. The practical upshot is that copying from Flash into Illustrator is impossible. This is a major problem, since one of the tricks I use when animating in Flash is to copy an object into Illustrator and then apply an art brush to give it a nice variable-thickness line. If you watch Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends closely you’ll see that we do that all the time. Virtually all the lines on the characters were done with art brushes. We also do it a little more overtly sometimes, even using a charater’s whole boy as a brush so we can really control them. You can see an example of this on the episode “Frankie My Dear,” which has a whole sequence where a tall pillar-like character is wobbling all over the place.
So what am I to do? I was kicking myself for having made the move to Flash 8 without fully testing my process in the new software. Then, on a whim, I looked at the “save as” dialog box. Oh! It turns out I can save my Flash 8 files back to Flash MX 2004 (the previous version) as long as I didn’t use any of the new features (which I didn’t on my turnarounds, the most important files when it comes to creating new scenes). So I’ve officially downgraded back to Flash MX 2004. That’s what we use at work anyway, so maybe this’ll provide more of a consistent experience for me.