Rollers
Yesterday we were watching Henry’s Cat which used to be a favourite cartoon of mine as a child. I did a quick google to see what sort of websites were out there with information about the cartoon and found the official Henry’s Cat site which then linked to a fab website all about making animations with loads of great information. There was also a link to the blog of Stan Hayward, the man behind both sites and creator of Henry’s Cat.
This morning Monster (and Teeny) and I have been looking at the MakeMovies site and getting some great ideas about very basic animation using cartoons and drawings rather than our previous 3d models or real objects. Monster wanted to have a try at a couple of more basic ideas so he came up with a stick of dynamite and an explosion which you can see by following the ‘bang’ link above and a cut out pair of jaws or teeth with a face at the top to open and close the mouth which you can see by following the ‘yummy’ link.
Although the windows movie maker is great for lots of twiddly bits and making professional looking movies from video clips it is not great for stills as I cannot work out how to shorten each frame to speed the animation up a bit so I found some free software called pic2vid which does a rather better job at that. It does insist on having audio which you can either record yourself by ringing them (and paying for the call!) or typing text in for them to transfer into male or female speech. It then seems to match the length of the clip to the length of the audio so on this occassion it worked quite well for our animations.
It does feel like a slight backward step when we’ve been making longer movies with more detail but I think starting at the very beginning with some real basics about movement, thinking more about every step and learning the craft from the basics is a good thing. Computer animation is just one small part of the science of film making and animation too and simple, hand drawn cartoons have a real beauty and art to them so I’d have hated to have bypassed this stage in favour of the more complicated plasticine and computer generated productions.
How much did you have to pay Herr. Schwarzeneger to do the voice-over for you? Very impressed! It’s a shame about the software hassles - don’t know either. Nice drawing by M.
I don’t know how much it would cost - hopefully not too much - but it might be an idea to use something like overhead transparencies e.g. from Staples plus appropriate pens.
That way you could have a fairly complex picture on paper e.g. a body for the monster or robot, and then animate part of the whole scene e.g. the moving jaws by overlaying the OHTs. In theory you could manage with only one OHT and wipe it clean between frames.
Anyway, I’m glad that M is putting in the graft to help him understand it all properly and not just know to go click-click with a mouse.
Comment by Bob — January 6, 2007 @ 8:54 pm
How bizarre; i happened upon henry’s Cat this week too!
Comment by Merry — January 8, 2007 @ 10:00 am