Zlogspot - animationandvideo

The Dork Knight was one of the very first animations I created in 2008 on the then very new GoAnimate (now known as Vyond ) website and animation studio. At the time it was featured as a Staff Pick and spawned two 'sequel' animated shorts. A very loose parody of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, The Dork Knight reimagines Bruce Wayne as a preteen nerd who thinks he can be a superhero. This version of the character is rich enough to have a butler (Alfred) but lives a more suburban lifestyle with his 'Batcave' being his mother's garage. Anyway, to cut a long story short, over the years I've bought probably thousands of dollars of CrazyTalk Animator content packs that I've barely used. I really want to do more animation that doesn't take months to complete and is just made for the fun of telling a story. Remaking my old GoAnimation shorts is something for years I thought would be a fun challenge so I finally decided to give it a shot. Rather than use ...

Bat Storm.  I've reviewed Muvizu before and recommended it to friends as a low cost entry point to 3D, drag'n'drop, animation. It's very much like a simplified version of Reallusion's iClone6 and, at just over AU$50.00 for the full licensed version, which includes commercial use, hard to pass up. As easy to use as Muvizu is, it can also grow with you as your skills improve. As you get more familiar with the software you'll discover just how customizable everything is. Making Batman with Muvizu I recently decided to purchase a Muvizu license and found, among the additional character styles unlocked, some really cool, stylized action superhero characters. Naturally, I decided to make a Batman character... because... Batman! Turns out you can get pretty close to a good looking, cartoon style Batman with the superhero male character (known as 'Beefy'). A great feature of the 'beefy' character is you can add a cowl of any color just by adjusting a s...

I recently teased the above Bat Storm image on my Facebook wall stating that it was a future iClone project that I hoped to work on. The image is just a fun test that I put together, in the space of about an hour or so of tinkering, after purchasing a bunch of Superhero content through the Reallusion Content Store and Market Place . Because the image looks cartoonish you could be forgiven for thinking it's something I drew myself. If you're not familiar with iClone and 3D animation techniques in general I thought I'd draw back the curtain a little and show you how this image was made. To begin, for all the crap (to be nice about it) GoAnimators get for animating with pre-made and pre-animated content, in the 3D animation community it's just a generally accepted practice to use other people's models, props sets etc. and no one ever calls them out on it (well I did once to a 3D illustrator and he got hugely upset about the thought of having to credit someone else fo...

GoHobbyist Forums Over the last couple of years GoAnimate has evolved from a site for animation enthusiasts who just want to get their ideas animated quickly to a site for businesses of all sizes who want to engage customers through animated video. As a result the GoAnimate 'hobbyist' community was slowly displaced as more and more community features were removed from the website. The final nail in the coffin was the removal of the old discussion forum at the end of 2014. A forum that had served the community since the site began in 2008. For many people the old GoAnimate forums were as much of a social hang out as they were a place to promote their latest GoAnimation. Recognizing this, a small group of well known GoAnimators got together and created the GoHobbyist Forums . They put the word out and gathered together much of the community from the old forums with many of the most well known GoAnimators joining as members. As of this post the community has more than 60 members ...

Cartoon Network released their first full trailer for the new CG animated series Beware the Batman and, although I'm a long time Batman fan - particularly animated and on film - it just didn't get me excited for the show. It's not that I think the trailer is bad or that the show looks like it's missed the mark on what makes Batman great it just that it's all CG animated and, for some reason, I find that disappointing. Which is really odd because this show is following in the footsteps of the Green Lantern CG animated series . Although I didn't watch much of Green Lantern, the episodes I happened to catch were really great, and I did like the design of the show. So much so that I have considered buying the series on Blu-ray or DVD - and I'm not that much of a Green Lantern fan. My problem is I can't get excited for CG animation anymore. Which is a shame because at one time CG animation was something I really wanted to do myself. Still do, in fact, but ba...

The character of Super Kent was one of my first creations on GoAnimate way back in 2008, not long after joining the site. The basic premise of the character is that he is a parody of Clarke Kent with the sole purpose of trying to convince his boss at the Daily Planet that he really IS Superman. Previously I created two comedy shorts, Super Kent and Super Kent Returns , both with the same format of Kent initially trying to convince his boss of his super powers without success. The boss then sends him to report on a breaking news story. It wasn't a character I had any plans to return to any time soon as I felt I'd moved on from my early GoAnimate superhero parodies. However TotallyEpicHD , the winner of my April TET Blog Contest, resurrected the character in his entry to my contest. Which inspired GoAnimator, gipsy, to make a flash version of Super Kent in his Super Suit. When I came across his post in GoAnimate's forum's I asked if he could create a flying action and a ...

It's been approximately two years since I completed Bat Storm, Episode 1: Financial Crisis and finally the first part of Episode 2 is here. Bat Storm, Episode 2: Pain, continues from Episode 1. Super Charge is still undermining Bat Storm's efforts to fight crime and Detective Smith is still unhappy with any Superhero doing police work. Impressed by the Jokester's business model of look-a-like employees Bat Storm has started to expand his party appearance business with new look-a-like employees of his own. Meanwhile the Mayor's office has experienced several attempted break ins by a masked thief and Bat Storm takes it upon himself to apprehend the repeat offender. E2/Pt1 Bat Storm: Pain by etourist on GoAnimate Behind the scenes, I never intended to take this long to release Episode 2. In fact the original intention of the Bat Storm series was to write and release each episode quickly, within weeks of each other, until I had completed a series of six 24 minute episod...

I realized that over the course of the last year or so I've started a number of projects in this blog and haven't really got back to them so I thought I'd give you an update on where things are at. Bat Storm, Episode 2 Last year I announced I was working on Bat Storm, Episode 2 , with an expected release date of August 2012. Obviously that didn't happen. For various reasons I had to shelve the project. The main one being me becoming some what frustrated with the direction things were going. I think I started to get a little too ambitious and I also didn't like having a script written in advance. I never wrote a script for Episode 1 , the story just evolved organically as I animated it. That's what really held my interest and pushed me to finishing it. I wanted to know how it ended. Recently I've released new Bat Storm, Episode 2 images onto my Facebook page because I've started working on it again. At the time of writing I have a full two minutes of part...