Animation and Video Life

Merry Christmas from Animation and Video Life.  It's the most wonderful time of the year... well not yet. The Nightmare Before Christmas is not just the animated Tim Burton movie, it's also the nightmare of trying to make your own animated holiday messages in the week before Christmas. Animation takes time. Why didn't you start those in November?! If this sounds like your nightmare, here are five free or low(ish) cost apps to help you back to sharing the joy of the season with animation, so it truly will be the most wonderful time of the year. Cartoon Animator 4 (or iClone7 ) Reallusion Marketplace search 'Christmas'. If you're already a power user (or even know your way around it a little bit) you'll know CA4 is one of the fastest ways to make completely custom animations. The Reallusion Marketplace has a bunch of Christmas content you can utilize, just don't be too ambitious. Drop in a background, throw in a Santa character, record a short message f...

Christian Haynes - Zack In Time.  If you've ever wanted to create an animated TV series staring your own original characters and stories then Los Angeles based writer, director, and animator, Christian Haynes is taking those next steps of putting together a team, developing a pitch/trailer for their series, Zack In Time. Featuring professional studio quality animation, they hope the show will get picked up by an animation studio for an official series. The path he and his team are taking is one you could easily follow as they deal with real life commitments, and building a following on Instagram and Tik-Tok showcasing their work behind the scenes. TET: Tell me a little about yourself. Who you are, and why you started animating? My name is Christian Haynes and I've loved animation ever since I was a kid. I would constantly be drawing cartoon characters from TV shows and movies and making my own little homemade comic strips.  As I got older, I became a lot more interested in s...

A selection of Comicgen Characters. Readers of Animation and Video Life will know I'm always on the look out for any kind of free character creator tool.  While Comicgen Comic Creator isn't exactly the best character creator it caught my eye because it's completely free to use, and the available character designs really lend themselves to that edgy, limited style animation that has somewhat influenced mainstream animated shows of late. ComicGen's Comic Creator Comicgen's Character Creator. Comicgen was created by the team at Gramener , a data, science consulting and A.I. service that likes to present their findings as 'data stories' sometimes in the form of a comic. However, drawing not being a strong skill, they decided to make a tool that could provide them with characters they could just export into their own comic panels. That's how Comicgen was born. Interestingly, if you have drawing skills, Gramener will pay you to create characters for their app...

Always start with a good microphone.  Bad Audio is widely considered the number one reason people will stop listening to a podcast or watching a video. While your audio doesn't have to be amazing it does, at least, have to be clear and audible for listeners to not give up on it. I've always had trouble recording my own voice because I'm naturally softly spoken. When I do speak up I can't maintain it for long sentences. Even with quality microphones, the higher range of my natural speaking voice isn't that loud - even with my mouth less than a foot away. As you can imagine, recording three and a half hours of me talking while demonstrating all the features of a software application, as I do in The Lazy Animator Beginner's Guide to Cartoon Animator , was always going to result in some pretty uneven audio (who can remember to keep talking loud while you're concentrating on a demonstration). I thought my audio was passable but I did get some strong feedback, pri...

One way to give your animated productions the best chance of success is to prescreen them with a test audience before you release them publicly online or send them off to a festival etc. Big, Hollywood studios do this all the time so they can make changes that will hopefully give their movies a better chance for success, so why shouldn't you? While it may not be practical to gather an audience together, and have them sign a bunch of non disclosure agreements, for your 2-3 minute animated production, Screenlight is a free (with paid options for additional features), convenient, online app, that's a great alternative. Screenlight is actually intended to be a group productivity tool for gaining client feedback on every step of a video production but the 'free forever,'  single user, one project,basic account, is an ideal feedback tool for small, independent productions and hobby animators. Simply upload your video(s) (up to 1 Gigabyte) to your Screenlight Project, share t...

From 2012 to 2020 I ran a service called Animation 4 Business that created animated explainer videos for businesses and educational organizations world wide. It started as a group of three freelancers (including myself. obviously), then became just me for a couple of years, and then expanded to me and three other subcontractor animators until 2020. For me it was a very successful side hustle that could have been a full time job if I hadn't subcontracted quite as much of the work out, or charged more per animation. My base fee per two minute animation was just under USD$500.00 using Vyond as my animation studio. I know a considerable number of animators that say Vyond isn't real animation in the sense that you, personally, don't animate everything from scratch. However, it's not all modifying templates with your own information either.  Vyond's content library is quite vast at this point. A good Vyond animator, who is very familiar with the library, can run circles...

3D CC3 TET Character, based on my Oppa Doll Avatar, used as the base for a 2D CA4 character. One of my favorite things to do is to create characters with any type of Avatar/Character creator app. In fact the first test I usually try with these tools is, can I make an avatar of me (or at least my The Extraordinary Tourist persona). Previously I've used 2D character creators like Oppa Doll as a source of artwork for some characters I've made for Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 4 animation studio but 2D character creators are limited to... well 2D. 3D Character Creators While you may think 3D character creators have no place in creating characters for 2D animation there are quite a number of advantages including: No drawing skills required. Render characters in any style. Use an art filter or even hand trace into line art. Need to animate the character in a specific pose or angle? Render out an image of the character in the required angle and animate it in 2D. Quicker to crea...

Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 4 used to support vector images in a big way back when it was launched as CrazyTalk Animator 2 . So much so that they built into the application a Render Styles system that made it simple to recolor vector images if you took the extra few steps to create vector color groupings for your G2 vector characters and props. Unfortunately G2 Vector characters proved to be too difficult for the average user to make, and it also required access to Adobe Flash (now Animate CC) for which many users weren't willing to invest in a subscription. Things haven't been helped by Flash being phased out as a web standard format in December 2020 either. While CrazyTalk Animator 3 , and now Cartoon Animator 4 , have surged ahead focusing more on high resolution bitmaps to create quality characters and props, the Render Styles system and support for vector images still remains. Except the only vector file supported is Adobe's SWF format. Reallusion's Ignores...

BlueStacks Android Emulator for PC or Mac. There are many free and low cost mobile animation productivity apps for Android in the Google Play Store that would fit right into your workflow if you could access them directly from your PC/Mac  desktop (or laptop) computer. Even if those apps can save their output to the same cloud storage you use with your PC or Mac, just the divide of using a separate device makes them inconvenient and disruptive. Worse yet, what if your Android device is underpowered for the apps you want to use, or worse still you don't own any Android devices because someone convinced you Apple Mac's, iphones, and ipads are 'cool' (they are, but you pay for 'cool'). BlueStacks is a free, open source Android emulator for Windows or Mac (currently only BlueStacks 4 can be installed on a Mac but BlueStacks 5 for Mac is coming soon). If you're not aware of what an emulator is, it's basically a piece of software that mimics another devices ...

I will create an animated cartoon caricature from your photo that says your message. View Gig on Fiverr . Creating a side hustle business from your animation skills does not have to be as complicated or time consuming as you may think. Which is ideal if you just want to earn a little money to pay your bills while you create your epic, animated, independent, feature film with the rest of your time. Fiverr Makes Side Hustles Easy Fiverr , the online marketplace for paid 'gigs', makes it easy to create a side hustle without the need for a built in audience or social media community. People specifically go to the site to search for low cost services that solve a need. All you have to do is stand out when people search for your specific skills. Joining Fiverr is free as both a buyer or seller. Becoming a seller is a little more involved as it's a little like filling out a job application with information from your resume. Nothing too difficult though, and don't worry if you ...

Bat Storm, Day Job by TET. This month Reallusion launched its iClone Lip-Sync Animation Contest in which animators are asked to make a 30 second iClone animation created using one or more of iClone's lip-syncing and facial animation tools or plugins. This includes; AccuLips , ExPlus , Facial Mocap , and even the new iClone plugin for Replica's AI TSS voice system . If you'd like to enter you still have plenty of time as submissions close on September 30, 2021. The total prize pool is valued at over USD$40,000 with first prize being $3000 in cash. If you don't have iClone , but are interested in giving 3D animation a try, you can download free 30 day trials of iClone 7 , Character Creator 3 , 3DXChange 7 , and Unreal Live Link , which can all be accessed from the competition site . There's also 50% discount for perpetual licenses if you do decide to purchase any (and I do highly recommend - and use - iClone 7 and Character Creator 3 as two of the easiest 3D animatio...