Animation and Video Life

Hoot the Owl and his Wisdom Tree are a creation of GoAnimator, TheseStars . I'm not sure if I just happened across her first animation of Hoot or if she asked me to watch but in any case I liked the idea a lot. I thought the idea of using GoAnimate to share a love of anagrams was both original and a great use of the site. The only problem was, in TheseStars original animation Hoot and his tree was just a static drawing. (a still from the original is shown below) . This wasn't very engaging to look at in the sense that it wasn't animated - something you would expect on an animation site. I had a feeling the character would have much more appeal if some movement was added. I was in the middle of working on Harry Chalk 2 but, looking at the drawing of Hoot I thought I could probably make an animated version with the most necessary basic moves very quickly. So that's what I set out to do. In the space of an evening I had created (in flash using Koolmoves ) Hoot...

Almost as soon as I finished the first Harry Chalk I knew that the animation would end up being a series. In fact I remember thinking, crap! I've started another series. The original has been sitting within GoAnimate's top nine animations of all time for four months now and spent several weeks of those months in the number one spot. It has been viewed more than 11,850 times. Not bad for a small side project. To get some idea of Harry's popularity I released Harry Chalk 2: Bill's Revenge on May 25th, 2010 and, five days later it's sitting at number 2 in GoAnimate's top animations of all time. That's a record for any of my animations. In this new adventure Mathew is learning the history of John F. Kennedy's assassination which prompts him to imagine Harry escorting the Presidential motorcade. Things kind of progress from there. Harry Chalk 2 Bill's Revenge by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! As y...

GoAnimate has been beta testing a new feature that allows you to add video objects to your animation. More about that in a moment. Just prior to the video feature's release to GoAnimate beta testers I made an animation called 'Moonlighting - TET's New PA'. The premise being Jim Benton's Happy Bunny, from my GoAnimate Complaints Department , series decides to take a job moonlighting as my personal assistant. The idea came about as I way to humorously inform my fans of the status on some of my on going series projects like MIB and Harry Chalk as well humorously look at some of the problems of being a popular GoAnimator. Moonlighting - TET's New PA by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! There's not much more that needs to be said about the above animation. It's basically the GoAnimate Complaints Department in a new setting with a trap door. I discovered GoAnimate's new video upload feature on GoAnimate...

It's golf but not quite as expected. Greg and Mr Usaji are having a quiet game of golf when suddenly Greg's ball starts to move all by its self. This short animation was put together fairly quickly to give my Domo Animate fans, who had been asking when my next Domo animation was coming out, something new from me. It's a rare occasion that I use anything other than Domo characters in a Domo animation but when I came up with the idea for this I was experimenting with the stick figure theme on DomoAnimate. I imagine this could be how Mr Usaji first met Domo. Domo Golf by etourist Like it? Create your own at DomoNation.com . It's free and fun! People have asked me how I made Domo's shell break away when hit by the club. It's a simple slight of hand effect. Domo is still in the egg but hidden by a grass coloured circle that moves along the same path as the shell. Then a different 'flying' domo is used to distract your attention. I would have li...

Koolmoves is professional flash animation software at a budget price and is a great alternative to Adobe's Flash Professional CS5 . At less than one twelfth of the price of Adobe's offering it's a great introduction for flash noobies to dip their toe into the water to see if it's for them without the pressure of a serious investment in software. It's also great for people like me who only need a fraction of the software's capabilities. The cost of CS5 is unjustifiable whilst the cost of Koolmoves is a good investment should you discover you want to do more at a later time. I bought Koolmoves back in February and I've now had some time to test it out. As I said I only needed a fraction of what this software can do so as a result I can only comment on what I've used. However if you want to program fully capable, flash web sites or make stand alone flash movies and cartoons then Koolmoves certainly appears to have everything you need. Me... I just wa...

Readers of my other blog will know that I'm a huge Batman fan. Specifically Batman on film as I don't read Batman comics at all. I've blogged about Batman many times. More about that in a moment. When I recently saw the movie Hancock it struck a chord with something I had been thinking about when I watched the movie, The Dark Knight . That is the cost of the property damage many of these superhero characters cause in their quest to rid the world of evil scum. Hancock creates a massive amount of unnecessary property damage that becomes a major cause of concern for the city he lives in. The cost of cleaning up after the heroes misadventures is a real issue. If you look at the opening scenes of The Dark Knight where Batman sends in the Batmobile to 'terrorize' the criminals, the car crashes through a wall and fires missiles into what looks to be a toll booth office of the multi story car park they are in. What is that costing the rate payers of Gotham? Ent...

After doing a GoAnimate Complaints Department Christmas Special many people suggested I should do an Easter Special. Initially I felt, with Easter being in early April it was too soon to bring Happy Bunny back to the Complaints desk. After all it takes time to build up ideas as well as collect them from the GoAnimate community. However it was the Easter holiday, which is a popular time for bunnies, so how could I not do an Easter Special? Despite my initial reservations about having enough ideas the finished special is over four minutes long - making it one of the longest episodes in the series. If you're not familiar with the Complaints Department series it does contain a lot of GoAnimate Community references as a basis for it's humor. Which is one of the reasons why the series is one of the most popular on the site. This episode alone has been viewed more than 6000 times. GoAnimate Complaints Easter Special by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com ....

My previous animation, Sneep Watching , started something of a mini cult following for the Sneep amongst Domo Animate users who included Sneep's in their animations . Capitalizing on that success I decided to see what other custom critters I could make from the available props and objects on Domo Animate. In the end I came up with the Parra Tweet, a bird made from various head props in the Stick man theme. Once I'd done that I needed an animation to feature the new bird. Since I'd already established Mr Usaji as a bit of a nature photographer in Sneep Watching I decided to continue the theme. This time Mr Usaji attempts to show Domo the pleasures of nature photography but Domo doesn't quite get it. He's just too excited every time he spots something to take a photograph of. Nature Photography with Domo and Mr Usaji by etourist Like it? Create your own at DomoNation.com . It's free and fun! As you can see I once again used limited frame animation to...

Having spent the last two years creating short animations for GoAnimate using my own original stories here are three of my best tips that I swear by when writing my scripts. 1. Use as few words as possible.  I taught myself this on GoAnimate because I realized early that using speech bubbles instead of actual voices would slow the action down. You want people to be able to read your dialogue as quickly as possible so they don't become aware they're reading. This way they will still feel like they're watching a video and not reading an animated comic. I later read in a book on how to script write for animation that professional animation script writers also aim for telling their stories in as few words as possible but for different reasons. In animation it is still quite hard to lip sync a character to the dialogue. The longer you watch a single camera shot of a character talking the more aware you become that you're not watching a real human talk. You start to ...

I'm happy to report that my Save the Tiger Animation  (a still from the animation is on the right) was officially announced as the winner of GoAnimate's Creating for a Cause competition. My animation featured Paul Dini and Misty Lee's Super Rica and Rashy characters humorously discussing the merits of adopting a tiger through the WWF and comparing the plight of wild tigers to that of the now extinct Tasmanian Tiger. This is a win for Tigers because my animation, to date, has been viewed by more than 4100 people which is quite an achievement in its self for anyone who knows just how hard it is to promote a video online. Unless you're lucky enough to make an internet meme it takes a lot of effort to share a video around. I really have to thank everyone who watched and shared the animation, especially my partner who's efforts managed to boost my placing in the finals (for number of views) from a shaky fourth to a comfortable third position. I think we've su...