Cartoon Animation

How to create a moving man....

But one of the most common things people want to be able to do with it is make cartoons and animations. There's a lot of ways to do this, but I'm going to show you a very simple, scripting free way of bringing some characters to life.

Creating a Basic Flash Animation

This is a great site for tutorials. We are going to do this animation in flash to get started.

This tutorial will help you to learn the very basics of Flash MX - basics such as layers, tweens, colors, text, lines, shapes, and more. By the end of this tutorial, you will have created the following animation:

Principles of Animation

Having created an animation in DFILM let examine the principles of animation to see how it fits together.

Back in the Halcyon days of Disney, the animators there began trying to dissect really great character animation to figure out what made it great. After years of study they made a list of 12 principles that all great animation utilizes.

WelcomeTo Animation Semester II

The journey begins. tonight is an opportunity to see what expectations everyone has. I wil put forward my perspective on animation, social software and where flash fits into all of that. We will discuss the sequential art, closely related to the traditions of comics, with the effect of animation applied to simply turn the still images, within a comic for example, into moving images.
From this perspective the idea of producing your own animations becomes a feasible concept!! Start by drawing up a comic or storyboard, then set to work adding motion or stop animation to parts of the images.
Tonight we will start up by having a play in DFILM

DFILM creates visual communication software for the youth market

DFILM Movie Maker demonstrates the theory in practise. We can deconstruct our animation into characters, text, backgrounds and sound. All sounds too easy, lets have a go.
This an excellent online tool that is based on the principles of animation.

Talking Pictures

Some more fun with Flash, but this time working with photos to create animation.

In this demonstration you will see me use GIMP and Flash to produce a talking picture of the Blue Mountains IT section head teacher, my boss Colin Tyrell!

Audio - 1.5Meg
Print out - 1Meg

For sound try this link



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Motion Path tween

We know how to make an object move form point a to point b in Flash. The Motion tween guide allows us to create a movement that will follow a line drawn with the penicl, a paint brush or a shape usch as a circle/oval. how you ask? Using a motion guide layer. Basically it works like this:

• Open a new flash document
• Create a symbol (we used a fly) - call the layer object
• Close to the new layer option you will find an option for new motion guide layer
• Create this motion guide layer
• Right click into say frame 30 on the object layer
• Choose - Insert frame
• Right click again, choose create motion tween
• Third right click into the same spot and insert a keyframe
• Click into frame 1 of the Motion guide layer
• Using the paint brush to draw a squiggly line from the object along the path you would like to move
• Change the tool to the move tool
• Make sure it is on the Snap to option
• Click into the keyframe at the end of the Object layer
• Drag the object to the end of your line, note the black circle in the the centre as it goes over the need of the line, it should snap on
• Press enter - does it work - congratulations BB!!!

Another Successful Night

Tonight we sucessfully created cartoons in Gnomez and published them to our blogs by screen dumping them and cropping in Photoshop. We used Photoshop's Save for web feature to optimise them for the blogs.
Ward sucessfully edited the cartoon in Photoshop and update his blog with the new version.
we looked at the Judy Horacek website as an example of cartooning and scripting, the used her fabulous "Silence of the Jams" cartoon for an exercise in flash. Usign trace bitmap the task was to do a 30 sec animation based on the cartoon. From one begining we had many endings!
Homework was to explore motion paths in Flash, there is a great lesson under Help/Lessons/Tweening.
Congratulations to Luke for a great job of digitising drawings, editing them in photoshop and getting around the network. Oh to be able to draw like Luke!

The Dalai Lama meets Gandalf

A short story - a remarkable cartoon.

What is in a Script?

Does your animation need a script? have you ever written a script? ScriptWritingSecrets might be just the help you need to get started.
It is really all about telling a story, whether the story be an epic "War and Peace", or a pictoral "Breakfast with Spot"

check out Judy Horacek website for some ideas on how to tell a story with very few words.

Judy Horacekis an Australian cartoonist and writer. She has been drawing cartoons for about twelve years now and has worked for a multitude of community groups, unions, small magazines and good causes. Her work is often concerned with feminism, the environment and social justice issues.

More free animation

Last week we looked at DFilm, a great free animation program online.
This week we are going to have a look at another great animation program that is used in some schools to help teach animation concept and have fun!!!
The program is called Pivot Stickfigure Animator , you can always find it by going to google and typing in "stick figure animation" or similar.

Rollovers in flash

Tonight we explore the world of button in flash. We will be creating "buttons" and givng them rollover effects.

To do this open flash:

1. Set the document size to 250 by 250 so it will fit on the blog
2. Create and object, say a red circle with the oval tool
3. Double click with the move tool to select your object
4. Press F8 to convert to a symbol
5. Choose the button option and name it appropriately
6. Double click your new symbol
   This takes you inside the symbol.
   
7. Right click into the hit frame to define your hot spot and add a keyframe
8. Add another keyframe into the over frame.
   
9. Add text or objects you want to appear when the mouse moves over the hotspot.
10. To display more when the mouse button is held down, right click into the Down frame, add a keyframe and make the desired changes
11. Your button is complete, click back to Scene 1 and test your movie.
    Placing an animation with rollover effects into your blog.
12. Save the file and go to File and Publish setting to explore choices
13. To blog it got choose the html and swf options and Publish.
    
14. This places the files in your folder where the files was last saved.
15. We are using http://www.openomy.com/ bmphotoshop with the usual password to store the swf file
16. Login into openomy and upload your swf file, as you would attach an email
17. Tag it ani so it stays with the animation files
18. When it is uploaded make sure you make it public or it will not appear without a password
19. Copy the address/path to put into the code so your blog can call it
20. Exit openomy and go to your folder and open the html file, got to View Source to see the html.
21. You need the bit between object and object
22. You will see the file name appear twice in the code, once at value="" and then at src="" - this is where you will paste the address/path from openomy.
23. Next copy the object to object, log into your blog and start a new posting.
24. Paste the code into your new post in Edit html mode
25. Congratulations, Publish post and your done!!!