#1 Animation a Week
So, after seeing these crazy things like song a week, and thing a week, and nanowrimo and FAWM, I figured I would try animation a week. Ya, that’s crazy. But it would get me into the animating. Here’s my first one.
Back when I made Fight, www.rastasia.nl gave me a whole wack of Stikfas. A very generous offer and I meant to make it up to him by putting him in the credits of my next Fight film.. But I never got around to finishing that yet. I still want to do it, but to get me back into the frame of mind of filming, I figured I would do these short 40 second films.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing though. I had to get back into the frame of mind of animating 24 frames per second. That’s 24 pictures for every second. The micro movements required for that is mind numbing. And I had to redo it a couple of times at the beginning to get used to filming in 24fps. Furthermore, Maggie keeps falling apart, because I didn’t use the new beta surfer girl that Rastasia gave me. And the Manny’s head wouldn’t turn for the life of me. Every time I would wrench his head around, his whole body would turn. Made for some choppy parts.
And now I hope I can come up with enough ideas in this series. Or maybe it will just warp as I go along because I’m not that good with continuity, who knows?
After I finished the animation, I exported it as a raw .avi file. And you know what? Premiere couldn’t read it. Good grief, how could it not be able to read an uncompressed .avi file? What’s WRONG with you Premiere? Drove me batty it did. In the end, I pulled up the old version of iMovie, brought in the clips (there are 8 clips) and exported it into a .dv file that Premiere could read. *sigh*
Then I found this awesome site which had all these kung fu sound effects:
Way Of The Socky
So I was happy, it’s hard finding sound effects for punches and stuff.
In the end, I’m happy with it. The lighting is really rough and flickery. But it will be a fun learning process as I do more of it.
Film Statistics
Filmed at 24 frames per second
755 Frames in the film
Took me 4.3 Hours for just the stop motion animation
Took me 2 hours to edit it (but that’s because of Premiere stupidity)
I wrote the song about a month ago and used it here. It’s called “Having Trouble Animating” (Yes, it’s based on Having Trouble Sneezing)
