With a timeline from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 through to The Princess and the Frog in 2009 this huge diagram charts 250 scale drawings of the Disney characters. Main characters, villains and secondary characters are defined with differently coloured silhouettes. Artist Juan Pablo Bravo has posted this on his Flickr Photo page for anyone to download. The original is a whopping 20779 x 440 pixels.
DigiCel FlipBook enables you to draw 2D animations with your mouse or tablet pen. You can also import drawings captured with a webcam or scanner. It creates a movie file you can watch on any media player, post on the internet or record onto DVD and play on TV.
It is a good tool for practising drawn animation because it allows you to make key frames and then space then out to add in-betweens. Once you have created a few drawings you can play them back at various speeds and decide if you need more in-betweens.
The DigiCel FlipBook workspace, displaying a demo animation that comes with the software.
It can also be used to review pencil tests of drawings made on paper and captured with a webcam. A number of big name animation studios use FlipBook for this purpose. It has a built in exposure sheet system with a display of the sound track so is useful for testing lip synch animation.
The FlipBook lightbox showing three layers of drawings.
This is a tool for the serious animator. It does not come with lots of special effects, but it does have tools to help the hand animator. These include layers, light box, background and trace functions. The Light Box lets you determine just how visible previous and next layers are when adding drawings. The Trace tool makes it easy to redraw roughs as finished line work. The drawing tools include variable line thicknesses, flexible lines and ovals. Colour can be added by brush, can or spray.
There are several easy to follow instructional videos on DigiCel website and there are a number of animations created with the software on YouTube.
You can try it out for yourself by downloading the trial version from the DigiCel. It is fully working but the movies it creates have a large permanent watermark.
Tip: if you decide to buy the software from the DigiCel website shop then look for the special offer on the home page of their website to get 50% off.
Preston Blair’s Animation was one of the first books that I added to my animation library many years ago. It is said by many industry professionals to be the best “how to” book on cartoon animation ever published. He went on to produce two more books and all three have been made available free on a website called freetoon.com.
In the introduction to the book Preston Blair said: “The art of animators is unique. Animators bring life to their drawings, creating an illusion of spirit and vigour. They caricature the gestures and expressions in the drawings, give them a fantastic array of character and personality, and make us believe that the drawings actually think and have feelings.”
He continued: “This book was written by an animator to help you learn how to animate-how to make a series of drawings that create a sensation of movement when viewed in sequence. The pioneers of the art of animation learned many lessons, most through trial and error, and it is this body of knowledge that has established the fundamentals of animation. This book will teach you these fundamentals.”
Here is a sample illustration from a page entitled The Dance Kick.
Page from the 1st edition
I was interested to learn that when Blair put the book together in 1947, he used the characters he had animated at Disney and MGM to illustrate the various basic principles of animation. Soon after publication the rights to use some of the characters were revoked. He redrew most of the MGM characters, replacing them with general characters of his own design for the next edition. The complete first edition can be downloaded free from the ASIFA website.
Preston Blair’s Animation 1st Edition Part One
Preston Blair’s Animation 1st Edition Part Two
There is a PDF version of Preston Blair’s Advanced Animation at the On Animation blog.
MonkeyJam is a free digital pencil test program that runs on the Windows operating system. It lets you capture images from a webcam, camcorder, or scanner and assemble the separate frames into an animation. You can also import existing images and sound files from your computer. Although it is designed for pencil and paper, MonkeyJam can also be used for stop-motion animation. Once you have created your movie it can be exported as an AVI file.
MonkeyJam information panel (click pic to enlarge)
The MonkeyJam software downloaded and installed on my PC without problems. The program starts with a window containing an information panel and a frame list. There is a help file with a quick start section to give the basics.
The first step is to select a folder to store your image files. The nest step is to select a method of adding your images to the frame list. This can be from a video source such as webcam or from a scanner. Alternatively you can import existing image files that you already have on you computer.
For the purposed of this test I decided to use the stills that I had created for my bouncing ball demonstration. It was simply a matter of selecting the images from the computer and clicking the import button. To view the animation you select Preview from the Tools menu and the software builds your movie and opens another window to play it back. It is as simple as that. You can then export your movie to an AVI file for sharing with others, such as uploading to YouTube.
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Mother of Many
Emma Lazenby’s film “Mother of Many” has just been nominated for a BAFTA in the Best Short Animation category. Emma has documented the making of her film in a fascinating blog called MoM written under the pen name of ElsieDarkwinter.
“Mother of Many” is based around the rhythms of a baby inside the womb and the rhythms and day to day routine of the midwife being calm and controlled – leading women through the most life-changing and challenging event of their lives. It was made using real recordings of childbirths and foetal heartbeats, combining painting on glass, hand drawn animation, Flash and After-Effects.
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Exaggerated squash and stretch is a great way to add amusement and believability to your animation. I have created a demonstration using a bouncing ball made of very flexible rubber.
This demonstrates Newton’s third law of motion, more commonly called action reaction. For every action in one direction, there is an equal and opposite reaction in the opposite direction; even if the object does not move.
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