ca-ca-ca-ca-cartoons

   So, this week in class we were assigned to make a flip book. Yes this sounds easy enough, draw some figures changing their movement ever so slightly over time. It sounds easy enough, but when you get down and dirty and about fifty frames in, it’s not so easy anymore. This is where you learn patience is a virtue.

Over the span of my life, a whopping 21 years. I’ve always loved to draw etc.. but I’ve never really tried to make a flip book, it has always sounded easy enough but when I actually started to sit down and draw each individual card out, I realized, although I was only working with stick figures. 100 notecards can take an awful long time.

My initial idea was to draw a stick figure dancing with a ball bouncing beside him, in the end he catches the ball. But wait a minute the ball is a bomb, he blows up blood everywhere, surprise at the end. In the end I stuck with this idea because I thought it was rather funny and sorta kinda fit my sense of humor.

When I actually sat down to do the drawing, I decided I wanted to devise a way to quickly and accurately, draw these to conserve as much time as possible, so with a clear drawer and I lamp later, I engineered my own light desk. So I could correctly draw each figure moving them ever so slightly in the next frame, creating that illusion when they are flipped by, that it’s actually moving.

So in the end it was pretty good, I liked the big explosion of blood at the end, anybody I showed it too laughed and wanted to see it again, so I would call that an success.

Now here’s the fun part, I have to take each card and scan them into my computer, and then open it in after effects to create a lovely around four second clip, with about 5 hours of work. That is a very nice ratio. Thankfully Simon Tarr our professor did show the class how to create such a clip in after effects, so I anticipate this shouldn’t be a problem, when I hit the grind once more.

Overall I’m really enjoying doing the work for my animation class, I admit it can be very tedious, and time consuming, but thankfully this is the work that I enjoy doing so I can’t really complain, because one day I know I will get paid for this kind of stuff. And it’s true the demands of a real job in this industry will be much more extensive that any kind of work were doing right now in class. Thankfully Simon tries to keep us busy every week with work, making it simple for us to get into the routine of punching out, in this case an animation every week, word.