Animation and Video Life

Replica A.I. Voices are great for in game character voices. I first trialed Replica Studios A.I. Voice Actor Text To Speech (TTS) voices shortly after they launched about a year ago and was suitably impressed by how natural they sounded. Some voices better than others but most sounding very close to human with the right inflections at the appropriate moments. Since then they have been working on improvements and adding more voices to their voice cast library. I have used Replica Studios on projects in the past, most notably on my 2021 Reallusion, Lip Sync Contest entry featuring my character, Bat Storm.  Mia and the Tourist. This time I've decided to use Replica to cast the other two voices in my upcoming Mia and the Tourist animated short that I've been blogging the process of creating through demonstrating the apps I'm using to make it. So far I've covered scriptwriting , storyboarding , background creation , and character rigging . When I say the other two voices ...

Adam West's Bat suit was also a very advanced fabric able to deflect machine gun fire. Anyone who has followed my work for a long time will know that Batman is my favorite comic book superhero. That's why my character Bat Storm is modelled after Batman and not any other hero. Less known is that Adam West, more than any other live action Batman, is 'my Batman' or at least the Batman of my childhood self. That's not to say I don't like other versions, I very much do, but Adam's Batman is the one that made me a life long fan - because I've never really read Batman comics. To this day I'll fight you on the best Batmobile being the 66 TV series version (including if you put it against every iteration from the comic books). So when the YouTube channel and VFX studio, Corridor Crew came up in my suggested videos with their The Batman Trailer, but with Goofy Batman , I was there.  Watch the finished, stand alone trailer below. It's my new, favorite Bat...

I resisted making tutorial videos for a long time because I don't like editing. Specifically I don't like editing me teaching as I step students through a process during a screen record. I have a tendency to insert long pauses not just in the middle of sentences but between multiple words in the middle of sentences as my pace matches what I'm doing onscreen. This makes for very long and very slow paced video tutorials. To counteract this I have to edit out all the pauses. This can take hours, or even days on particularly long tutorials. For example, when I created my main course, The Lazy Animator Beginner's Guide to Cartoon Animator , I literally injured the thumb on my right hand, operating my mouse, as I spent weeks taking out all my pauses (seriously, I had to wear a thumb brace for a few weeks to fix the pain). Recently I came across TimeBolt , a very affordable, fast editing application with the featured purpose of removing all the pauses from your video (and even...