The animation with a .... je ne sais quoi!
someone was asking about TV Paint on the AM forum so I decided to share my toolbar with everyone. The drawing underneath is based on someone’s blog.
You can download my toolbar here
http://www.olivier-ladeuix.com/blog/uploaded_images/tvpaint/Olive_TradiTools1.6.zip
As you might have noticed, I have a fixation on Mike Mignola’s Hellboy character. I am not too sure it is because of Red’s skin colour or the very graphical design of the character and the toys or even the fact that I met Mignola at the Birmingham comic convention 2 years ago.
Anyway I found this great blog relating the production of the Hellboy TV serie. Have a look, it is pretty interesting. They talk about all the different aspects that go into the making of an outsourced Direct to DVD animated feature.
Communicating with the oversea studio
Colours, there was an other one on the choice of colours but I lost the link
Here is where I am right now. Floatiness fun and ackward mouth shapes. Don’t worry it is all gonna be fixed in the next pass 😉
I kind of took onboard some of the suggestions but the most noticeable change would be the framing. I was going through few DVDs this week end and realised the cutting the hands wasn’t too much of a big deal so here I am. I think the shot works better this way. We can focus a bit more on the face and the character takes more screen space.
Few people commented on the fact that I kind of go back to the same pose but I didn’t want the character to move too much on the screen so I don’t think I had much choice.
Some people wanted a progression which I would normally agree with but the audio doesn’t have that much contrast in the intensity so I d rather go for something much more contained.
Ah if someone knows how to do the breathing with Brussel/Bishop, please let me know.
I feel it is time to bump up some of the cool links from my bookmarks:
My friend Maciek’s blog:
http://maciekgliwa.com/blog/
Sylvain Marc’s blog:
http://polyminthe.blogspot.com/
Mayerson on Animation:
http://mayersononanimation.blogspot.com/
Temple of The Seven Camels, great posts about composition, storyboarding, cinematography:
http://sevencamels.blogspot.com/
Alan Cook “Cooked Art”:
http://cookedart.blogspot.com/
Character design blog:
http://www.characterdesign.blogspot.com/
Animation treasures:
http://one1more2time3.wordpress.com/
Mc Cloud Framefilter:
http://framefilter.blogspot.com/
Here is the blocking for a shot I am working on. I didn’t get much response on the AM forum, let’s see if I can get more comments here. There will be a BrussHell kid on the right.
For the past few weeks, I have started sketching on my way to work. I am still using a demo version of TV Paint that closes down after 20 minutes and doesnt allow saving.
TV Paint is a really great software and I haven’t used Sketchbook pro for a more than a year now.
I mostly do caricatures/character design and usually start with 2 spheres, one for the cranium and an other one for the chin/jaw, then I place the different features (ears, noze, eyes) at different height, in order to give some personality to my character. That s a tip I got from Steven Silver. The drawing above was my first test with shadows and didn’t work very well. Instead of starting with a white page next time, I will start with a mid gray background. This should will give me more range. An other exercise I learnt from Steven Silver is to draw the feature into a geometrical shape (triangle, square, rectangle and circle), do you know any other?
After spending a bit of time around the net I finally replaced the default HTC Touchflow interface with the classic Windows Mobile 6.1 UI enhanced by a really cool add-on called SBP Diary. It is obviously not for everyone but personally I prefer to have my calendar/todo list on my home screen rather than shortcuts to softwares. The application is $20 and there is even a demo version on the website.
here is a list of freeware I find really useful:
Cathy: To organize your collection of CDs or DVD
Virtual Dub The swiss army knife of video compression, editing and capture
KMPlayer: probably the best media player for Windows, great for animators as you can scrub the timeline with the audio feedback
Timelapse photobooth: best timelapse webcam capture software
IrfanView: with Paint.net one of the lightest photoediting and screen capture software
WinSCP: FTP, SFTP freeware, that one has recently been recommended to me, I was using Leechftp until now
Syncback freeware: to synchronize files between computers/FTP
Windirstat: I spoke about that one some time ago. Visual disk usage statistic viewer
as some of you noticed, my blog was down for the past few days.
Like Keith Lango mentionned on his blog last month, WordPress is a great application but the hacking problem is a big issue which I am fed up fighting with. I was talking to Andrew Gordon few month ago and he was complaining about Splinedoctors issues as well.
I have successfully upgraded my WordPress application to 2.7 but WordPress is taking so much of my precious time that I might end up like Keith and go back to Blogger.
Ah
Copying large files across a wireless network or automatically to a FTP can be a bit painfull unless you use a Synchronization software.
There are many for Windows, and plenty of free ones. SyncToy is the default Microsoft one but “SyncBack Freeware” is my favourite SyncBack. You can find it here
SyncBack Freeware
