Animation and Video Life

TET Monkey Domo Postcard. I haven't spent a whole lot of time on Domo Animate of late. I just want to assure people I haven't completely forgotten the site with this postcard (above) I created in the Domo Animate Studio. Something that is fairly unique to Domo is the creation of still image artwork slide shows using just the shapes and props found in the Domo Animate Studio. You get it to some degree on GoAnimate but I've never seen it to the extreme detail of some of the talented artist/members on Domo. The image of one of my own cartoon monkeys that I've created using just shapes in my postcard above is a simple example of what I'm talking about but you should go over and explore Domo Animate for some of the excellent and highly detailed examples.

GoAnimate has introduced another Type a video, Quick Template only theme with their new Wildlife Animals cartoons. Mathieu Leader, a.k.a Cartoon King , who recently did some voice acting for me on Harry Chalk 3 , has put together this humorous animation featuring the theme's elephants. Drunk Elephant : by Cartoon King Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! These quick templates are actually a lot of fun to just pass the time with. You can't really save your animation mid process which means you know going in that you're probably only going to spend an hour or two at most creating an animation. It may not sound very creative but from a script writing point of view it's not a bad way to practice writing  short funny sketches or humorous anecdotes without all the extra effort of animating it as well.

Harry Chalk 3 - Matt Fights Back continues on from Harry Chalk 2 - Bill's Revenge . Bill's supernatural powers have enabled him to free himself from the confines of the black board world. Now he's continuing his pursuit of Matt who broke every stick in Bill's body in Harry Chalk 1 - Secret Agent . Harry Chalk 3 - Matt fights back by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! I was reading my previous post on Harry Chalk 2 and was reminded that the whole reason I started this series was to do a really cool stick figure fight - which I've yet to do in the series. Ahem... well, I guess I failed miserably with this episode on that goal. However I hope I still delivered with a cool story. Previously I've voiced every character myself in this series but with Sally White having so many lines my really poor female voice (that you can hear in Harry Chalk 2) just wasn't up to the task. Thankfully GoAnimator,  Rocque , answer...

The modern day mobile phone is often referred to as the 'smart' phone. At the top of the list is the iphone with Android handsets becoming increasingly more popular. But are they really smart? Let's listen in on a random conversation in the video below. Smart Phones - Lost by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! This animation features one of the quick templates in GoAnimates latest Type a Video theme, Talking Picz. The theme is a departure for GoAnimate as it uses templates and talking faces unique to the theme i.e. you can't access any of the backgrounds or faces in the GoAnimate Studio. I'm still not a big fan of the Type a Video themes. No matter what I make I can always see how I could improve it if I could just edit it myself and add my own custom sounds, voices etc. However, as I've said previously, they are a great way to get down a quick idea for a bit of fun - such as I have done in the video above. G...

It was a long time coming and a whole lot of thinking time too but Episode 1, Part 4 of Bat Storm: Financial Crisis is finally here. This is the exciting conclusion. Of course, if you haven't seen Episode 1, Part 1 , Part 2 or Part 3 , clicking those links will take you to their respective blog posts where you'll find that episode. In this final part, Bat Storm and Bat Flash follow the clues and close in on their man. With the reward money for the safe return of the missing girls back in their sights it seems financial prosperity will soon be theirs... or will it? Ep 1 / Pt 4 Bat Storm: Financial Crisis by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! Part of the reason it took so long for me to make this fourth installment was finding a 'family friendly' motivation for James (a.k.a. the Jokester's employee Jokester). I didn't want this episode to go down that dark path where the two girls got hurt in any way so I came ...

Pimp My Ride is a short and quick animation I made to showcase my mini van, flash made prop (made with Pencil Animator ) and how to use the prop with the Stick Figure car. The idea for the joke is that Bob is the master mechanic but he spends so much time working on cars he really doesn't have time for things like picking up girls. He just doesn't have any concept of what girls would find cool in a car... Pimp my ride - new van prop by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! I made the van for the final installment of episode 1 of my Bat Storm series but I just couldn't be bothered trying to animate the wheels with Pencil Animator. You literally have to draw every frame by hand and I didn't want to spend the time when I could use some perfectly good animated wheels from the stick figure car and get the same result in no time at all (thus proving that GoAnimators sometimes are a bit lazy!). The second installment came about...

Ever since the introduction of the the import video feature for GoPlus users of GoAnimate people have thought about the possibility of creating Roger Rabbit style animations, combining live action people with cartoon characters. I first attempted this when the video import feature was introduced with my animation TET's PA Video Test . In that animation I simply overlaid cartoon elements and characters in front of the video. It worked reasonably well. However to truly combine live action people with cartoon characters you need to be able to place the cartoon background and characters behind the live action video as well. To do that you need either a blue or green screen to combine the cartoon and video together in a technique known as chroma keying (more commonly referred to as 'green screen' or 'blue screen'). Watch my test video below to see my completed example using GoAnimate. Note that I recorded the video with a really short time frame to get it done so ...

GoAnimate introduced its new 'Type a Video' Quick Templates with their March Madness Competition themed around the game of Basketball. The criteria was simple. Make an animation using the March Madness template and make it relevant to the theme. The best judged entry would win. I actually made four separate entries using four of the five available backdrops for the template. Each of my animations told a small part of the same story about the leagues top player, Larry Throwgood. Rather than embed four separate animations I've used Youtube's online video editor to compile all the animations into one short video. Each scene transition is the start of a new part of the story. None of my entries won the competition (or even placed) but I wouldn't have like to be a judge on this one. Since the only real involvement a user has after they've chosen their set and characters is the script, that's really all the judges could judge. Click here to view the winnin...

GoAnimate is #winning when it comes to creating topical animations whilst a hot topic is on fire. No matter what all the GoAnimate detractors say, there's few traditional animators that can get a one minute or greater, satirical animated cartoon made within hours of a topic exploding. Take the launch of the iPad 2 or Charlie Sheen's Two and a Half Men melt down. There are few traditional animators that would sit down and make a cartoon specifically to make fun of these events. It's a lot of work and time to devote to something that will be out of date probably within months or maybe even days of being finished. That's a niche that GoAnimate can fill. In the right hands a fairly good satirical animation can be made in hours, providing a fun way to interact with an issue beyond writing a blog post or filming a live action response video. Below is my iPad 2 parody promotional video that I created for my main blog post titled, iPad2, Steve Jobs - Easy Targets . WARNI...

Bat Star who appears in this short comedy sketch called, I'd like to buy a cape , was my first attempt at creating a Bat Storm character with GoAnimate's Lil' Peepz character creator. I actually made him around the same time as I made my Lil' Peepz, Bat Flash character (who appears in Lil' Bat Flash, End of the Road ), but didn't really have a project to use him in. Since then GoAnimate has added a whole bunch of Superhero costumes and I've made a better Lil' Peepz Bat Storm (pictured left). Which is why Bat Storm, Mark 1, is now called Bat Star. Up until very recently you couldn't add a cape to any GoAnimate Lil' Peepz or Comedy World character - This is why my Comedy world Bat Storm character does not have a cape. In one of my unreleased early previews for Bat Storm I had him in a clothes store very similar to this video (but using a Comedy World background) asking about buying a cape. However that's as far as I got and never expanded...

GoAnimate Complaints Department - Cyborg Bunny was prompted by me being featured on the first episode of GoAnimator, RoTV's series, Robot Turkey. However the idea to replace Happy Bunny with a robot rabbit at the complaints desk is something I thought of way back in December of 2009. GoAnimate, Product Manager, Nicolas , created his own custom character set known as Isometrix which I featured in my animation, Blink  in December of 2009. At the time Nicolas suggested to me he would create an Isometrix rabbit character. I said, if he did I'd definitely use it in an episode of the GoAnimate Complaints Department. I guess Nicolas got too busy because, as far as I know, he never made a rabbit Isometrix character so I never used it as a robot rabbit on the Complaints Desk. Then in January of 2011 RoTV released his parody of Adult Swim's, Robot Chicken , called Robot Turkey, featuring me, which prompted me to revisit the idea of a robot Happy Bunny. Ro's animation is b...

Bat Storm's Bitter Sweet Moment is my second collaboration with Cartoon King a.k.a. Mathieu Leader (the first being Undead and Unemployed ). Matt really wanted to write a Bat Storm story so I said okay. It's fair to say Matt and I did quite a bit of back forthing over the script with a couple of re-writes. The problem we had initially was Matt was writing for Batman not Bat Storm with a script that was actually too large for Bat Storm's world. Which is something any aspiring writer should take note of. If you're going to write for someone else's characters you need to learn who those characters are. Matt scaled it back and came up with this story about Bat Storm's past as an unsuccessful small time thief. Bat Storm: Bat's Bitter Sweet Moment by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! The first thing you may have noticed is that the title refers to this episode as 'Alternate Universe'. This is something...

Between December 2010 and March 2011 GoAnimate ran their Bring on the Noise contest in partnership with the Tribe of Noise indie music sharing web site. Animators could choose from a selection of about 15 songs and make an animated music video for their favorite. You could enter as many times as you like. I managed to create two entries, the second of which you can see at the bottom of my post about Episode 1, Part 3 of Bat Storm: Financial Crisis which didn't get the required number of Facebook Likes to be considered a valid entry in the competition. My first entry, below, not only made the cut it was the first runner up in the competition (effectively second place). As well it was the most viewed and the most recommended of all entries by the close of the competition. Re-animatrix: 'Afghan Sands' by Stoneye by etourist on GoAnimate Obviously my video is inspired by the closing battle in The Matrix: Revolutions but it wasn't the music that prompted me t...

This animation is not a swipe at either GoAnimate or Xtranormal. I'm a strong supporter and user of both sites. The only reason I don't use Xtranormal as much is, as the video points out, it costs REAL money... and, whilst GoAnimate isn't 100% free either, its flexibility (again pointed out in the video) means it's where I get better value for money. So watch the video and then I'll tell you what it's really all about... I created this animation as a way to try out Xtranormal's new Stikz theme - which is some weird merger between 2D and 3D animation, resulting in a few awkward angles by the auto camera that really aren't appropriate for the theme (notice some of the side views where the stikz guy's face is almost a line). Partially inspired by TinyWatchProductions' iPhone4 vs HTC Evo  Xtranormal video that went viral on YouTube back in June of 2010 (Just imagine the Xtranormal character as the iPhone4 customer) my animation is a parody of...

Episode 1, part 3 sees another child reported missing and another reward being offered for information leading to the child's where abouts. It's incentive enough for Bat Storm to resume his role as the world's greatest detective (well he likes to think so). If you haven't seen episode 1, part 1 and part 2 of this superhero series then click the links to visit their corresponding blog post and episode. Ep1 / Pt 3 Bat Storm - Financial Crisis by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! In this episode you get to see more of Manfred's role as Bat Storm's personal assistant. Not only does he organise party appearances he also does background research on cases Bat Storm is working on. You also get to see some of Super Charge's motivation for trying to undermine Bat Storm's crime fighting abilities... essentially he's looking out for Bat Storm and Bat Flash because he thinks their crime fighting efforts are m...

Where's Your Helmet?  is a short animation I made to accompany a post I wrote on my main blog titled "Life's Tough, Get a Helmet" - Literally! Both the post and this animation are inspired by the quote "Life's tough, get a helmet" and both are humorous ideas about the thought that what if we took 'getting a helmet' literally. You might think there's not really a lot of behind the scenes stuff to talk about on such a simple looking animation... and you'd be right. However that really is the point. After creating so many fairly complex animations I thought I'd set myself a goal of doing something really simple. Just a simple script and a sparse execution. Make it all about the joke and not about the animation. I also wanted to create it as fast as possible. Although it probably looks like I only spent ten minutes putting this animation together it was actually closer to two hours including coming up with the joke. Animat...

I think the fact that Captain Kirk had a bit of a reputation of being successful with the ladies was what prompted me to use the Star Trek theme on this animated music video for Tone Loc's song, Funky Cold Medina . Although I'm a huge fan of the song when it was released back in 1989 I uploaded it to GoAnimate intending to use it as a backing song to my GoAnimate Complaints Department Plus animation. However it just didn't seem to fit. In December of 2010 I decided it would be a great song to help feature Some of GoAnimate's new Musical Action packs including 'Lead Singer', 'Black Guitar' and 'Drummer' as well as the not so musical action pack, 'Romantic Male'. Those of you with a musical ear should listen out for all the different samples Tone used to create this awesome track. Funky Cold Medina was made at a time when mix artists were ripping samples from all kinds of songs without a care in the world for copying rights. One of t...

At the beginning of December 2010 I was inspired by another discussion to issue a challenge to any GoAnimator that wished to participate. The challenge was called ' You Can't Do That on GoAnimate ' which I posted in GoAnimate's Forum. Several newer members had been complaining that they found GoAnimate limiting because many character actions that people would like just weren't available. For me part of the fun of GoAnimate is working out how to overcome those limitations and make the characters do things beyond what their pre-animated actions allow. Hence I issued the challenge in two parts as follows: Part 1: [ for everyone ] Suggest an action scene or sequence that you think isn't possible to achieve on GoAnimate in the studio. Suggest as many things as you want. e.g. a fight sequence using only comedy world characters. (short sequences/scenes only please) Part 2: [ for super awesome animators ] see a suggestion that you think you can animate? Go ahead...