At our studio, Perennial Pictures, work continues on “Crawford the Cat.” Above is a screenshot from a scene that uses a simulated multiplane camera effect. I love the way the buildings and rooftops glide past the camera giving the scene a slightly three-dimensional feel.
This post includes a sequence of three short scenes by animator Daryl D. Pyle. In them, Daryl mixed a fair amount of hand-drawn animation to that of Flash created animation. In these scenes, the Handycat animation was hand-drawn on paper and was mostly completed outside of Flash. (Note the pegs holes.) The multi-level animation drawings (bodies, heads, arms, mouths) were then scanned-in to the Flash program and put into position on the Flash stage. The bees in the scenes, however, were completely created in Flash and then “animated” by the computer.
“Crawford’s Classics” is an hour-long TV Special our studio is producing. This week more scenes were completed for the show. It features Crawford the Cat - a character we developed a few years ago for a series of “how-to” shorts.
Here’s another pencil test from HANDYCAT. This is Drillbit running up the steps. Animation by G. Brian Reynolds.
Click here to see it.
(Be patient – the pencil test takes longer to load.)
It wasn’t always as easy as powering-up the ol’ computer, loading up Flash and then happily manipulating your graphics to a soundtrack playing synchronously on the timeline. Nor could you instantly and easily review the work, make changes, and then pop the scene out in color – skipping entirely, a whole department called “Camera.”
Animation production last century meant sweating it out for a day or so until the film had been processed and printed. Only then could one see if the lip sync was right, or if the camera operator properly executed that double pass shadow effect, or if the ink and paint dept had applied the appropriate cel-level-compensated paint color. Not to mention the myriad of other things that could and did go wrong, even when the scene had been dutifully checked all along the way. That was just the way it went. Ahhh, the good old days…
A few [Read more…]
