Web and Video

Some really rough notes from Sandro Corsaro’s presentation on character animation with Flash. First of all, I really recommend checking out one of his sessions (here at MAX or elsewhere) if you get the chance. He’s a great presenter, very enthusiastic and well spoken… and funny.

animation history: principle of how started, and by end of session, simpler understanding of animation
Persistence of vision. Things are not as they appear - animators can experiment. exaggerator - you have to lie about reality. can buy into animation when not much there. Sort of believe something has happened. Powerful tool of animation.

In 1940 at WB a 6 min animation cost 50K.
By ‘55 they were 70K
Closed things down because not getting return on investment.
2 guys at MGM (Tom and Jerry guys) had idea started a new company called hanna barbara. So in ‘55 HB created 21 min cartoon for $2800

Did “limited animation” - every character had something to separate head from body - separate action of head from action of body. head moves independently - can turn their head and their body stays stationary. This is what flash is. Beauty of Flash, can do limited animation, but sophisticated in what you can do.

Put so much personality into the limited design - infuse them with so much emotion.

Do quick animation - stretch and squash. Flash a lot like clay - draw until like ines with hand on Ctrl Z. Pull lines until you get what you like. Impt to have nice sharp lines. Pull things around. Using the brush tool.

After done, turns the eyes and head into symbols.
For most part uses graphic symbols, unless project calls for mc’s.
Use ink tool to add ink to the inside of the black outlnes - and then moves it over to the right so it’s outside of the character by a couple mm. Then fills in to make the shadow. Then goes to the other side and moves it inside by a couple mm’s,

Tweens are overrated, he says. So doing a face looking left, and flips horizontal to make it look right. Squashes shape and stretches to give it a bit of bounce up and down in the middle and end of the animation. In the center, he draws the face looking forward for a second. And draws some lines to “blur - to add a bit of motion. Persistence of vision.

Showing mouth animation - you have a number of different moths, and you pull the frame number you want. Put down one keyframe for the mouth, and you go to pop-up and select “Single frame” in PI, and enter the frame number for “First”.  Use graphic symbols for this instead of MCs.

If you have limited time to design a character, strategy involved. determine how to reuse stuff as much as possible - how cna you nest things and put them in the right spots.

And that’s it, from “Adobe Lady”.

(4 votes, average: 3.75 out of 5)

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