Animation and Video Life

Almost every comic book (or graphic novel) artist eventually comes across American cartoonist, Wally Wood's 22 panels that always work . pictured below. Note that the subtitle, provided by Wood's ex-assistant Larry Hama  (who is responsible for compiling this version of Woods Panels), reads: "Or some interesting ways to get some variety into those boring panels where some dumb writer has a bunch of lame characters sitting around and talking for page after page!" This suggests clearly that these panels were intended to add life to conversational style scenes with very little action as a way of making the scene more visually interesting. Hence, generally you wouldn't apply these frames to action sequences - though I'm sure some would work. Although intended for cartoonist and comic book artists many, if not all, of the panels translate reasonably well to film and animation and could serve as a source of inspiration for giving your own films a more visua...

If you've ever watched a cartoon on television or at the movies you'll notice that most of the time you never see just one view of any scene. The camera position changes quite often depending on which character is talking or if the director wants to show the scene from a more interesting angle or just a different point of view. In doing this it creates the illusion that the characters are in a more complete environment much like live action film or video. With a bit of creativity you can create alternate views of GoAnimate's existing backgrounds using existing props and minimal custom prop creation. Take a look at these examples that I created for various animations. Enigma Sunshine's Bedroom Everything in Enigma's bedroom, from my Enigma Sunshine animation , is an existing GoAnimate prop except for the mobile phone on her desk. The room its self is the Comedy World theme's 'girls bedroom' with the addition of a desk and laptop computer. Di...

The more realistic Anime theme was introduced on GoAnimate back in June 2012. At the time I was very busy with creating business animations but I did take some time to try the theme out and started making The War Beyond . The War Beyond by etourist Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com . It's free and fun! The premise of a war starting without the two main characters really being aware of what's been happening in the wider world around them was inspired by the film Tomorrow, When the War Began . In that film the group of teenagers take a camping trip to a remote location only to come back to an invasion of their town that no one was aware was going to happen before they left. My version looks at the idea that teens are often so engrossed in their own world and circle of friends that they sometimes don't pay attention, or even just ignore, what their parents are doing as well as not knowing about news and current events affecting their community. The style of...

Over the course of my life I've owned a lot of books about how to draw cartoons but only one about how to draw and create animation. In case you're interested it is the Walter T. Foster published book How To Animate Film Cartoons  (No#190) by acclaimed animator, Preston Blair. So I thought it was time to buy another book, this time updated to the way animation is created today. Whilst a lot is still hand drawn, as shown in Preston's book, modern animation has embraced the digital age and gone far beyond hand drawing everything. Computers are a big part, and probably even the central tool, in any modern animators tool kit. I didn't have a lot of money to invest but I tried to go for a book that I thought would cover as much of the animation industry as possible. That's how I came to buy Andy Wyatt's book, The Complete Digital Animation Course: Principles, Practices and Techniques: A Practical Guide for Aspiring Animators . As an overview of the industry t...

3D animation (of the polygon and texture map kind not the 3D glasses kind) is something I've wanted to get into ever since I saw the cut scenes created for the original Tomb Raider game back in 1996. I've embeded the opening cut scene to the first level of the game below. It looks quite primitive now but back then it was very cinematic for a game cut scene. It was the closest thing I'd seen to the possibility of making movies with strong characters directly on a home computer. The problem was that I never could afford a computer powerful enough to run the software 3D animation programs require. The system I had at the time could just barely run the Tomb Raider game in low resolution mode. Seemingly, every time I was able to buy a more powerful system, 3D animation software had progressed and required a system more powerful to run it. Because of this I eventually gave up on 3D animation as something that was accessible to me. Fast forward to the September 2012 r...