Animation and Video Life

This installment, part 5 of my parody series, Men In Black 2 , Rashy launches his evil master plan with devastating results but for who? Find out in the video below. Note: be sure to watch the video below before reading further as my behind the scenes notes WILL spoil the final scene of this episode if you haven't seen it. Pt5: Men In Black 2 by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! When I started making part 5 of MIB2 I had three objectives: Explain how George and Dick came to be working for Rashy despite being on his 'hit' list in episode 1.   Get Rashy into the White House.   Break Barack and Joe out of their cell so they could start heading back to Earth and expose Rashy's brilliant disguise.   The first two were pretty straight forward. George and Dick did in fact mess up after a practical joke by Barack and Agent A. Rashy's ingenious disguises meant he'd have no trouble getting to the White House (and t...

Have you ever wanted to start your own animated cartoon studio business but thought such an idea would be too complex to set up and, besides that, you need to be able to draw, right? Well, not necessarily on both counts. Recently animation sites  GoAnimate and Xtranormal announced new Commercial Use Packages that include re-seller accounts i.e. accounts that allow you to create commercially licensed video animations with their studios for clients to use in their business. GoAnimate is a site that specializes in allowing anyone to make 2D cartoons (e.g. such as Saturday morning cartoon style animation) easily with no drawing skills required. It relies on pre-drawn and automated characters that you simply drag, drop and position on pre-drawn backgrounds. There's plenty of room for customization to give your final cartoons their own unique style. Xtranormal specializes in 3D cartoons (i.e. 3 dimensional characters and sets generated from wire frame models - not 3D as in 3D...

Binfer is a desktop Java application that allows you to transfer large or multiple files to any internet connected device directly - bypassing the need to upload or temporarily store anything on a server 'in the cloud'. You can even transfer files directly to devices and computers with a modern web browser that do not have the Binfer application installed. As well those same devices can send large files directly to your Binfer Desktop application simply by filling out an online form. Built into the desktop application is a simple text chat feature allowing you to chat directly with other Binfer desktop application users in your contact list. Files transferred are AES 128 bit encrypted by default - which can be turned off if you wish. There's no limit on the number or size of files you can transfer although Binfer limits the amount of data you can transfer based on your user license. A free license will allow you to transfer up to 200MB of data. File transfer sp...

This installment, part 4 of my parody series, Men In Black 2 , Rashy's disguise once again doesn't fool Agent Obama and the chase is on but who really has the upper hand? Find out in the video below. Pt4: Men in Black 2 by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! Spoiler Alert: Make sure you've watched the episode before reading further! Initially this whole episode was going to be Barack and Joe chasing Rashy. I wanted there to be lots of action and comedy in the style of many cartoon chases you see, such as the classic 'hallway of doors' where the pursuer and those in pursuit run between numerous doors across a hallway, almost impossibly emerging from different doors each time. Then, as I thought about the episode more, as a viewer I'd be disappointed with a long, drawn out chase scene where the story doesn't really progress. Plus I already kind of did the same thing in the first Men In Black series wi...

My Men In Black, episode 2, parody series continues in these latest two installments where Agents Obama and Biden, having seen through Rashy's clever Newt Gingrich disguise, are now hot on his trail. In part 2 we see the return of Rashy's reluctant, double crossing partner in crime and what could be better than seeing a democrat firing off a few hundred rounds from a big gun! Pt2: Men in Black 2 by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! Then in part 3 not everyone is happy with Agent Barack's skill with a rifle whilst Rashy forgets his 'guest' status and clearly over stays his welcome. Agents Obama and Biden seek solace in a few after work drinks and Rashy regroups with yet another cunning disguise. Pt3: Men In Black 2 by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! Neither of these parts have much to report behind the scenes. Everything is mostly stock standard GoAnimate born ...

WeVideo is a professional online, cloud, video editing and project sharing application that works right in your browser. It attempts to compete with equivalent licensed software that you can buy for your computer, such as (in my case) MAGIX Movie Edit Pro . WeVideo is free for personal use and comes with a range of paid plans that give you more features and benefits depending on your needs and how much you want to spend. Check out their video below which gives a great overview of WeVideo's service. In this review I'm going to see if I can use WeVideo to create a typical video for my main YouTube channel, etourist2 , where I mostly upload art and animation demonstration/tutorial videos. Before we start, here's a run down of what a free account offers: 1 GB storage 360p resolution 15 export minutes per month Export to Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo and Twitter 5 invites per project 390 licensed music titles With only 1GB of storage this account is clearly targe...

GoAnimate recently launched it's new US Election 2012 theme with a stylish set of new characters reminiscent of newspaper editorial cartoons. You can check the characters out right away by clicking the above link which will take you to the GoAnimate Quick App for the theme. Making your first Election 2012 animation is as simple as following the four step process in the quick app. If you want to make something a little more advanced you'll need to choose the Full-Featured App option which will fire up the GoAnimate studio. For me the new theme is an excellent reason to fire up a second episode of my popular Men In Black series  from a year or so ago. The premise is that Barack Obama is nearing the end of his term as President and, as a particularly gifted MIB agent who can see through disguises, he spots the Evil Genius Sock Monkey, Rashy (from the first episode), posing as Republican Candidate, Newt Gingrich. Watch part 1 below. Future parts of this episode w...

Bat Storm in custom jump Action created with Koolmoves. My favorite GoAnimate character set theme is Comedy World. Despite the limited number of costumes I still get a kick out of using the Comedy World Character Creator to create new characters for my animations. However what I don't like is the limited range and very wooden movement of the characters. Which is not especially good for creating Superhero stories like my Bat Storm Series . Having recently purchased Crazy Talk Animator Pro  I noticed how that software creates a lot of character actions by creating front and three quarter view 'puppets' out of similarly drawn views of your characters. I got to thinking, could I do the same thing with GoAnimate's Comedy World characters? Initially I'd hoped to use Crazy Talk Animator to create my puppets since the software can export flash files but unfortunately my tests failed as the exported files weren't compatible with GoAnimate's studio. So I d...

Ever since Chaostoon released his Sonic the Hedgehog character into the community on GoAnimate you've all thought it but it took the More Actions Protest Group and a plucky little chick to take the complaint to the top... well Happy Bunny at the GoAnimate Complaints Desk at least. GoAnimate Complaints Basic by etourist basic Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! Apologies to Chaostoon but you did commit the sin of promising so much (making Sonic available to the community) if people supported your FaceBook quest for tickets to a festival and under delivering on people's expectations - even though they knew Sonic was done as an April Fools joke and was never intended to be a full character. Hopefully you might deliver a few more actions when the paid work dies down a little. You'll notice that this animation also includes a Sonic the Hedgehog head prop created by me and attached to a blue Happy Bunny body. That prop was the start ...

I've just realized I haven't kept up with posting my Domo animations to this blog so here's four Domo Animations you may have missed... Snakes on a Plane As Samuel L. Jackson pointed out many times, the movie Snakes on a Plane has a great title, and that's reason enough to appear in the film. The title is where my parody pretty much starts and ends. It's snakes on a plane but done Domo style... Snakes on a Plane by etourist Like it? Create your own at DomoNation.com . It's free and fun! Domo's Road Trip Seeing the more and more complex prop made images by Domo Animate users and building upon the prop only characters like the Sneep and the Para-tweet that I created in earlier Domo animations I wanted to take it to another level. The two questions I get asked the most about this animation is 'Where did you get the car from?' and 'How did you make the car move?' Domo's Road Trip by etourist Like it? Create your ow...

What used to be called 'Type a Video' animations is now known as 'Quick Apps' on GoAnimate. The apps have been upgraded to include a limited range of facial expressions and, if you're a GoPlus user, some apps will even let you use your own custom Lil' Peepz or Comedy World Custom Characters. That's how I came to make Ironman Vs Metal Detector... Ironman Vs Metal Detector by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! If you've seen my previous post, Cleaning Out my GoAnimate Account - Unused and Unfinished , you'll recognise this sketch as a kind of sequel to the Super Charge/Superman metal detector sketch in my Unused and Unfinished animation. In fact that particular scene is directly referenced in the Ironman sketch. You may also recognise my Ironman character (well as close as you can get to Ironman with GoAnimate's Comedy World Character Creator) from my Charlie Sheen animation, Charlie Sheen agre...

I've been in something of a creative funk in terms of creating GoAnimations of late. I had quite a few unfinished projects in my account holding me back from starting anything new. Wanting to finish things that I had started but lost a lot of enthusiasm for was really getting to me because I don't like to quit on ideas once they've started to take shape. Finally I decided that enough was enough and it was time to cut these ideas loose. However looking through them, I thought there were some ideas that had potential and it would be a shame to just delete them. I also noticed I still had my partially finished and unused third Bat Storm trailer. Since I did spend some time working on these ideas I thought it might be interesting to show them off in a kind of 'deleted scenes' style animation. To that end I've put together 'Unused and Unfinished'. A collection of scenes from all my unfinished works that I've decided to discontinue. Unused and Unfi...

Ryu Will Fall is a throw back to old school GoAnimating. There's no custom backgrounds or props and I've used speech balloons with no sound other than a music backing track. The basic pr emise is Sakura is in love with Ryu (of the Street Fighter Games) and she has her sights set on capturing his heart. Hence the 'Fall' part of the title is not meant to be literal. I must admit I'm in a bit of a slump as far as GoAnimate goes so I decided to try one of the badge challenges (Ryu's Monologue) just to animate something. The badge challenge has some fairly strict limitations. You can only use Ryu as a character and there is no mixing of themes. Fortunately there was a prop image of Sakura so I was able to use that rather than her actual animated character. The music track is the same music I used in my Escape animation . None of the existing Street Fighter game tunes seemed appropriate and none of the GoAnimate classic tunes were available without mixing th...

I came across Magisto's new 'Magical video editing in a Click' site via Mashable's article, Automated Video Editing Site Makes Movie Magic Out of Raw Footage . If the above two link titles don't give you a clue about what this new start up site does then I'll elaborate. The purpose of the site is to take a bunch of raw camera footage (i.e. unedited, direct from your camera footage) and, using the sites built in subject recognition algorithms, produce a finished, professionally edited, short video with an audio music track that you can share with your family, friends and other people in your online social networks. The site is not targeted at the the video professional and is definitely not designed for long format video. Rather it's for the average person filming short grabs of live video such as clips of the family, places traveled to, family pets etc. who wouldn't normally take the time to edit that kind of footage together. Thus often post...

Harry Partridge Interviewed by Animation Aficionados  in a recent (August 18, 2011) podcast interview that goes into some detail about Harry's work, techniques and inspirations. Well worth listening to, although it could have done with either some editing down or, as Harry points out, more explanation for the audience about some of the things being talked about. However, people who've seen Harry's GoAnimate video may like to listen to the first 10-15 minutes for Harry's commentary on GoAnimate and the motivation behind his animation, which reaffirms his indifference to GoAnimate as he stated on Newgrounds in his animation description : For the record I am indifferent to the software. I have no problem with people wanting to create animation with it for fun as long as those with loftier ambitions aren't letting their skills stagnate. I spent a lot of time with 3D movie maker as a kid because I didn't know how else I could create animation and I really wis...

One of the ideal uses for a website like GoAnimate is creating animations based upon comments, feedback and conversations online. The kind of thing you just wouldn't sit down and spend months animating - well, maybe, if you're from Ardman Animations  scouting for a new season of Creature Comforts  you might - but for the rest of us... probably not. However, just for a bit of fun with your friends or simply for your own amusement, animating an online discussion or comment is one of the things GoAnimate can do well without taking months away from more important animation projects. Here's a recent GoAnimatation I did of an email reply I received about my post, Harry Partridge, GoAnimate, What I Observed . I did send this person an actual email reply that, after thanking him for his comment, opened with the line written at the end of the animation. The exchange of emails did lead to a slightly more interesting and coherent discussion than is presented here but the c...