Today was a fun one as I finally had some time to sit down and draw out some animation.
I’ve always wanted to try animation and I’m sure a lot of people have thought the same thing. It seems so easy, “all you have to do is draw some pictures.” But then the realization that movies playback in real time and that to simulate movement requires re-drawing those pictures many, many, many times to make up something that people would watch. To say nothing of having a good script and sound. But, those are other concerns.
For today’s challenge I tried my hand at animating a short sequence. The animations in the order that they appear are:
- In the Attic Creations title card
- First Man Falls
- The Blob Smiles (aka, “the bean”)
- Stick Man Gets Hit by a Car
“In the Attic Creations” is an idea I’ve had for a title sequence for a long time and I’ve used it unofficially as a name for my creative work publications. It’s never really taken off but this title card is the one I’ve had in mind ever since I came up with the name years ago.
“First Man Falls” is literally the first animation I did as I just wanted to try out the APP and how it works. The version that appears in this sequence was slowed down in FCX since the original was only 12 frames or something. Blink and you miss it.
“The Blob Smiles” is my attempt to draw “the bean”, which is standard practice for design schools. You can see that I need to work on it quite a bit more.
“Stick Man Gets Hit by a Car” was supposed to be “Smiley Face Man” but I forgot to import the smiley face and so just drew a stick man instead. This would be my first attempt at “long form” animation. Haha. The scene is a template given by the FlipaClip APP but the stick men and car are all by me. I had to extend the timing of this clip to 75% as the original was just too quick.
Some sound effects were taken from FCX but others I had to make. These include the “Boop” sound you hear at every black card; the background noise for “The Blob Smiles”; the “la la la” and the scream of “Ah!” and “My car!” in the Stick Man short. I recorded these with my cell phone in WAV format and then imported into FCX. The quality is pretty bad but I’m not sure if it’s because of the microphone or the codec that Xiaomi uses in their phones.
Final file was exported in 1080p directly from FCX.
This was a fun experiment and I can see myself doing more of this. This experiment also almost had me purchasing a license to FlipaClip because it is such an easy program to use and is something I could probably use in some other applications. I’ll hold off for the moment since it would be another program to learn and I want to focus on getting through this month of challenges first.
However, one thing I did notice in today’s challenge was that, a) there is another reason to upgrade my iPad version so I can have a larger canvas to use and newer, more responsive tools and screens, b) this type of animation can literally be down while lying down. That, to me, sounds great. It’s can be a very relaxing form of creative output, kind of like using Garageband.
Full playlist for the #MayYouMakeYourMovie 2021 Challenge can be found here: