Flash Practice...A sort of Joker bloke...

The Magic Paintbrush

Once upon a time, there was a young man called Ma Liang. He was poor and kind and helped a rich man to tend cattle. He liked drawing and drew pictures everywhere. One night, he dreamed that an old man gave him a magic paintbrush and asked him to use it to help poor people. When he woke up, he found the magic paintbrush in his desk.
From that day on, he used the paintbrush whenever people needed help. When he saw that people had no water to use in the fields, he drew a river and the river came to life. People could bring water from the river to the field and save a lot of time and energy.
When he saw it was difficult for people to till lands, he drew a cow and the cow came to life. People could use the cow to till lands very easily.
So when he saw the peoples' troubles, he would use his magic paintbrush to help. Then many people knew about the magic paintbrush.
But a few days later, the rich man whom Ma Liang helped heard that the magic paint brush could turn everything to life. He was a bad man so he had an idea to steal the paint brush from the young man. He knew that he could make a lot of money by turning things to life and keeping them, so he sent some people to the Ma Liang's home and took him to the prison. He got the magic paintbrush and felt very happy.
Then he invited a lot of his friends to come to his home and showed them the magic paintbrush. He drew a lot of pictures, but they could not become real. He was very angry and asked some people to get Ma Liang.
When Ma Liang came, he said to him, "If you draw some pictures for me and turn them to life, I will set you free." The young man knew that he was a bad man in the village. Of course he did not want to help him. He had an idea. He said to the bad man, "I can help you, but you should obey your words."
The bad man felt very happy and said, "I want a golden mountain. I will go there to gather gold." The young man drew a sea first. The bad man was angry and said," Why did you draw a sea? I do not want this. I want a golden mountain. Draw it quickly."
Then the young man drew a golden mountain which was far away from the sea. The bad man saw that and felt very happy. He said, "Draw a big ship quickly. I want to go there to gather gold." The young man smiled quietly and drew a big ship. The bad man jumped into the ship first and a lot of his family and friends jumped in too. When the ship sailed to the middle of the sea, the young man drew a large wave and it destroyed the ship. So the bad man and his friends died.
After that, the young man lived with his family happily and kept on helping the poor people. So the magic paintbrush was known by everyone.

I will do this in 640x360 dimensions for widescreen

Concept art for Ma Liang

An alternate design for Ma Liang...or 'Bloke'

Work-in-Progess Cow

Because Im using a computer with an Old version of flah, this is as far as Im going with my motions tweens so far, It will be far easier to do the more complicated tweens on the newer version such as the tail, eyes and head/ears combo.

Test Scenery

Test scene in flash (cropped in flash scene), Below is a working scene with tweens...

Adversary- 'Evil Bloke'

A free experiment I drew using flash because I like the effect of the software, This is a starting design for 'Evil Bloke', Below I have made a verry basic motion tween...prepare to be blown away...

Character test

Photoshop Animation-Zen saying

*Knock on the Sky and Listen to the Sound*

Walk cycle

Here is the final outcome, I added the sound of footsteps and some background noise using a very high quality microphone called a Zoom H1, Here are some audience comments and feedback...

• "Very sucessful walkcycle, and follows the human motion of walking well. It has a quirky feel because of the jerk motion when walking"
• "Impressive use of shading and tone, it makes me emotional"
• "Better than I can do, and it runs smoothly"
• "Its good, but to improve, more frames could be added inbetween"
• "The hair is a good touch, it moves as he is walking"

These are some Basic drawings I did to scan onto flash and add more detail later. To do this I drew over stick men guidelines I also drew just to get the positions of movement, drawing over these on flash after creating them all as equal sizes was essentially useful.
A basic 8/9 step walk cycle guide

Walk Cycle Evaluation 

A few weeks on from doing this walk cycle I can notice many faults, for example the colouring is not as good or precise as it could be by using the right flash tools, the lines are different thicknesses and small things like the right leg changing size.

Doing this again I would know how to use layers more effectively and I would better animate the hair swish, however in my animation i will leave the hair alone to avoid eye-sores, however I may look into it with my extra time if I have any after the narrative is complete.

1st Storyboard

I plan to create the character voices and many sound effects myself to create a unique style, I will also incorporate a background noise capture.

An amazing animation 'Your Face'

This style of surreal exploration greatly interests me...

Anime and Manga

Anime are responsable for some of the biggest japanese franchises in the world such as :

• Dragonball/Z/GT (above)
• Poke'mon (owned by nintendo)
• Yu-Gi-Oh!
• Beyblade
• Gundam wing
• Medabots
• Digimon

And many more, also many feature length films.


Traditionally anime have characteristic stylised propertions such as eyes, also uses blocks of shading as a style, I find this japanese genre quite artistic and beautiful at times. Most anime drawings consist of 2 or more blocks of colour shading and dis proportioned/exaggerated features such as large eyes and small nose, this may be useful for animating sections of the face to create expression...

Betty Boop: HA HA HA- rotoscoping

An early example of rotoscoping-(laying over film)

This is pretty excellent, especially for the time...if you excuse the trippy hysterics mid-way through...

Steamboat Willie-Cel Animation- November 18 1928

This was the 3rd Mickey Mouse adventure but the 1st to be released...therefor was Mickey Mouses' 1st appearance! Also this was the 1st cartoon with syncronised sound!

Emile Cohl

Paint on glass Animation

< Young Emile Cohl : "The Father of the Animated Cartoon"

Created one of the first cartoon characters, named 'Fantoche' (below)

A brief history taken from 'The Bioscope'...

"Cohl (born Emile Eugène Jean Louis Courtet) first established himself as a caricaturist, cartoonist and writer in the 1880s/90s. In 1908 he joined the Gaumont film company, originally as a writer. He soon graduated to directing comedy, chase and féerie (magical films in the style of Georges Méliès) films, but then moved to making animation films, a kind of film only just starting to be created, largely through the example in America of J. Stuart Blackton, whose Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) and Haunted Hotel (1907) opened up a whole new world of cinematic possibility.

Cohl worked with line drawings, cut-outs, puppets and other media. He also took the idea of animation one step further by cresting a character, Fantoche. His first animated film, the delightful stick figureFantasmagorie (1908), is held to be the first fully animated film, employing 700 drawings on sheets of paper, each photographed separately. Cohl developed a distinctive personal style of animation, where a figure would metamorphose into some unexpected different image, taunting notions of reality and logical sequence."

The Earliest Piece of Film...

"A horse in motion"
Apparantly this was all to do with a bet someone made about whether a horse lifted off the ground at anytime whilst running...

Praximoscope

This method is identical to the Rotoscope method except it uses mirrors in the centre which reflece the images rushing past on the inside of the wheel.

Image projection- magic lantern

Wiki-The magic lantern has a concave mirror in front of a light source that gathers light and projects it through a slide with an image scanned onto it. The light rays cross an aperture (which is an opening at the front of the apparatus), and hit a lens. The lens throws an enlarged picture of the original image from the slide onto a screen.Main light sources used during the time it was invented in the late 16th century were candles or oil lamps.

The notorious 'rat-catcher' routine, made possible by using 2 pieces of moving glass, during the show the audience would provide the sound effects of the slide...

...Linked to the Planetarium attractions around the country, and even products based around the same sort of idea as the lantern, the product used in households put on a light show using beams of light that can rotate and change through the devices' projector.

Motion Capture

This is an example of a recent leap in Mocap technology from the Rockstar game 'LA Noire', I highly doubt this level of new technology would be availiable to me let alone the funds to hire suibtable actors.

'Uncharted' (Naughty Dog) Mocap performers and outcome.











A Mo-Cap suit, a computer would pick up the signals of the orbs on the suit to then create a wire-frame model for character movement.

An attempt at using the whiteboard approach (by me)

The History of Man...ish



Here is an animation I did a while back entitled 'The history of man...ish' using a (pretty unclean) whiteboard. However as this was a casual, unproffesional animation it is very basic and in one frame the whiteboard cloth can be seen, If anything this opened my eyes to how much care and time must be taken for it to really pay off.

Different types of animation:

Here are some examples of different means of animating...

• Stop-motion-Whiteboard-Verry effective as you can always see the image of the last thing drawn and change and alter it easily becasuse of simple erasing possibilities.
  

• Rotoscoping(Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over live-action film movement, frame by frame, for use in animated films)-wikipedia, An interesting outcome but I feel the method to be too bland and lacks in imagination compared to other methods. Rotoscoping basically means later painting over real film stills. A full length film called 'A scanner Darkly' was made using this technique.
  

• Computer animation (use of computer animation software), most likely the easiest method.
  

Traditional (by hand sketches, later putting the stills together in sequence)-This technique dominated cinema until it was made near extinct by computer software...however I still apreciate this technique because the hard work put in has more soul than computer methods.

HOW TO ANIMATE TRADITIONALLY (...a handy tutorial)-'Cel animation' made obcelete in the 90s by computers

On inspection you may see that Disney have re-used some of their templates for cel-animation...this slightly spoilt my childhood memories...

An Impressive environmental piece...

This piece seems like something I would like to produce as it breaks the boundaries, using a 2D layout exploring a 3D environment and interacting with 3D objects is a beautiful achievement in my opinion. Something that makes an animation incredibly is the audience recognising how long and how much effort went into the final outcome.

Flip books- basic film reels

This is what can be achieved when enough time and care is taken in creation...

Flip books used to be around a lot when I was young and especially to a young mind it looks incredible when done well. I remember finding it strange with the illusion of having a video in my hands by flicking through a small booklet. A flip-book works in essentially the same way as a camcorder, by taking many many pictures so that the signal becomes fluid.

HOW A CAMERA WORKS

Bird & Cage optical illusion-Thaumatrope

Flowers and Vase


Bird and Cage



Also achieved by an optical illusion involving an after image, this is the most basic relation to animation by fusing 2 images in a loop.

The Phenakistoscope

SEE IT IN MOTION

Taken from wikipedia-
"The phenakistoscope use a spinning disc attached vertically on a handle. Around the center of the disc a series of pictures was drawn corresponding to frames of the animation; around its circumference was a series of radial slits. The user would spin the disc and look through the moving slits at the disc's reflection in a mirror.
The scanning of the slits across the reflected images kept them from simply blurring together, so that the user would see a rapid succession of images with the appearance of a motion picture. A variant of it had two discs, one with slits and one with pictures; this was slightly more unwieldy but needed no mirror. Unlike the zoetrope and its successors, the phenakistoscope could only practically be used by one person at a time.The phenakistoscope was only famous for about two years due to the changing of technology."

This is to do with persistence of vision, in the eye an afterimage is thought to persist for roughly one twenty-fifth of a second on the retina. This is what gives the illusion of fluid motion when still images are flicked through rappidly. However nowadays the shutter speed on video recording equipment is becoming so refined that it is close to trumping the time we take to see thing is reality.

Here is a modern-day Phenakistoscope

Research into 2D animation: historical and technical

"Animation" discovered from the Latin name anima, the "animating principle", the vital force inside every living creature.

During the Paleolithic Age, it is believed that Early man first used tools, possibly the most important leap for artistic expression for mankind aswell as multiple vital other aspects. Because of this, cave paintings began to appear, popular scenes being a hunt. They are often in areas of caves that are not easily accessed. Some theories hold that they may have been a way of communicating with others, while other theories ascribe them a religious or ceremonial purpose. Many cave paintings communicated a story in a storyboard fashion so anyone seeing them could follow the changing events throughout the paintings.

I remember seeing an animation on a cave wall, of the figures coming to life in a kind of naustalgic story-telling technique, this was intersting because of the concept and consistency of the genre of film. I think I saw this in 'Ice Age' and will search for this segment at a later date for research. An example of a modern day interpretation would be the Ps3/Xbox game 'Dantes Inferno' in which the prequel of events is stylised in stills as if coming from a crusader tapestry (below). I find this interesting because this was the way of the Age to tell stories of events but put together in a modern means, the compliments between old and new create an effective synergy.

Dantes' Inferno