Zlogspot - animationandvideo

Skateboarding Cage Monster by TET. Around the beginning of December 2018 I started work on a new CrazyTalk Animator 3 , G3 character of my own original design. Known as 'The Cage Monster' readers of my TET Life blog may recognize him as the Skatepark mascot for the long since closed Cage Skatepark . I didn't document the creation process in this blog, as I've done with other characters in the past, as I didn't want to start yet another series on a new character that I may or may not complete. At this stage I have completed a full G3 'side' view character rig which I managed to finish faster than usual because I could simply copy and paste all the hands and facial features from my G3 color monkey characters (that this character was derived from and which you can purchase in my Reallusion Marketplace store ). The Cage Monster will become available in my store when I've completed a front view character rig and his fully animated skateboard prop. The skate...

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 ...

Something silly from an unfinished animation project. With the redesign finished, Animation and Video Blog (i.e. this blog) is now Animation and Video Life to bring it in line with my other blog, which I recently rebranded as The Extraordinary Tourist Life . Why the New Name? The purpose of the new names (but same URLs) is to kind of distance both blogs from the term 'blog' and to reposition them as more online magazines. Which is really what both sites have always been - where as a blog is more of a diary or journal, at least in its original incarnation. The addition of the word Life is very appropriate as I'll still be writing about my own projects and life inside animation and video, but it also extends to anyone's life in this field. Making it easier for me to have guest writers, should I choose to do that in the future. Easier to Read and Navigate on Any Device One of the main goals of the redesign was to make this site more adaptable to any size screen. Whilst t...

I realize I haven't posted anything to this blog since my last update in August. Largely because I haven't really worked on any of the things mentioned in that post that I was hoping to be going on with. Instead I've been focussed on completely upgrading and redesigning my main blog (now known as The Extraordinary Tourist Life or TET Life for short) into a more lifestyle magazine look and mobile friendly design. You should follow the link and check it out. It took quite a bit of work but I'm really proud of how it looks now. This Blog is Getting a Makeover Whilst I'm on a roll with redesigning things (I also gave my TETAnimations Youtube channel page a mini makeover), during November I will be giving this blog a similar makeover and template to my TET Life blog. Though it definitely won't be a matching template this time. I really want my two blogs to have their own identity moving forward. This post is a heads up for that change which will begin happening p...

Since the last time I did a Project Update Post  back in April I've become better organised by finally embracing Get It Done which is, in my opinion, the best of the many time management applications I've tried. #notsponsored. Anyhow I amalgamated all my task lists into that app so, whilst I can't physically work on every project I've started, thought about, got bored of etc. They're all listed, and at least not forgotten. So what am I working on over the next few months? My YouTube Channels (The Extraordinary Tourist & TET Animations) My original YouTube channel, The Extraordinary Tourist has recently had something of a makeover in order to clearly focus it on my two main interests going forward, Art and Skateboarding. I'm striving to release a video every Tuesday and Saturday and have mostly kept my schedule even if videos have been a day or two late. The Extraordinary Tourist YouTube Channel. I mention it here because the channel will feature some cross...

Reallusion is running its Animation@Work Competition again. I've been away, not writing blog posts, so I could focus entirely on getting my entry done. Now that it's finished, this post I'm going to run through the creation of my entry and highlight some of the techniques I used to create it. As per 2014's competition I'm entering the Business Animation section of the competition, presumably playing to my strengths, and allowing me to create an animation entirely from pre-existing content store library elements. This category is judged mainly on story, story tempo, sound design and animation skill. There is a preference for significantly modified content store characters but it's not an essential requirement (which is where my entry is at its weakest - none of my characters are modified at all from their base character). My goal was to create my entry as quickly as possible. Reallusion has always promoted CrazyTalk Animator as a fast animation workflow and I wan...

Scene 2 from my storyboard, Infinite Monkeys. Work on my Infinite Monkey animated short is definitely back on track since my last update and my previous part 4 post . To get things moving again I've decided not to spend time creating a final draft storyboard that uses all the actual props and characters. This is something that you'd generally do if you were planning to show the storyboard to someone else for feedback. At this point I'm not planning to do that so I'm going bypass it and create and animate each scene as I go, saving a bit of time. The next stumbling block was scene 2 of my storyboard (pictured above). Initially I thought I was going to have to design, draw and animate a whole new monkey character just for this scene. I wasn't really into doing that, then I remembered my existing Reddy the color monkey character has a three quarter view puppet rig that would be ideal, plus there's no reason why I can't use multiples of Reddy since, typically, ...

Bat Storm and TET - Muvizu. It's been a little while since I posted anything to this blog about my own projects thanks to that neck injury I mentioned in my last Animation Diary post update . So, now that my neck is much better,  I thought I'd do a quick run down of what I am hoping to focus on in the near future in terms of creating my own animated shorts. I have two main priorities, finishing my Infinite Monkey Theorem short, that was only supposed to take 3-4 weeks at the most to complete, and finally doing some Muvizu Bat Storm animated shorts. Infinite Monkey Theorem This character has been rigged and animated in my most recent work on the project. Infinite Monkey Theorem has become something of a burden because it really has taken much longer than anticipated, causing me to lose a lot of enthusiasm for getting it done. I'm itching to start new projects with CrazyTalk Animator 3 but I haven't started anything because I'm pushing myself to finish Infinite Monkey...

Work on my Infinite Monkey Theorem, animated short has mostly stalled in the last few weeks. Readers of my other blog will know I've been struggling with a neck injury (sometimes referred to as 'Computer Neck') that has made doing any kind of lengthy computer work a literal pain in the neck. I'm getting through it but, if you spend a lot of time in front of a computer, I highly recommend you take five minute breaks, at least every 30 minutes, to walk around and do some neck stretching exercises. Anyway, to get this project back on track, I'm trying something a little new to create my video diary of my latest work. Recently I purchased a new Logitech HD webcam (my old webcam was a pre HD relic) which I've teamed with OBS studio , a free application staple, used by live streamers everywhere. OBS Studio allows you to not just stream but also record to a single video file, multiple video/audio sources into a single production. Kind of like a TV studio recording a ...

Top Down Typewriter Prop by TET. As far as my Infinite Monkey Theorem animated short goes, I think I'm just going to have to stop stating what I hope to complete by the next post and just be happy with the fact that I've completed something, and that the project is progressing. Last post I was hoping to have the entire final draft of my polished storyboard finished this week but instead, all I've managed is to create a top down view of my typewriter prop. Not that the prop is a straight forward drawing of a typewriter. It has been created in layers so that various parts can be easily animated in the final short - but still, I thought I'd manage more. There's not much to explain. It's a similar process to how I created the character for scene one of the storyboard so sit back and watch the short video below if you really want to see the creation of this prop from start to finish. Note that this typewriter prop may end up in my Reallusion Market Place store once...

Final character art, scene one. Continuing to work on my Infinite Monkey Theorem animated short , I had hoped to have finished the entire final draft storyboard by now. However the holiday season being what it is, I didn't get as much time to work on it as I had hoped. Despite that I can show you the entire process of me taking the character (loosely based on myself) in the opening panel of the storyboard, from rough sketch to the final artwork that I'll use in the animation. Obviously the main image at the top of this post shows the final character so, just to remind you of how the character started out, below is the rough sketch version. The original rough sketch. The basic steps I followed to create the final version was: Import the rough sketch into Clip Studio Paint. Sketch a more refined version of the character. Trace the outlines onto a vector layer for easier line work editing. Break up the body parts into their own layers. Add raster layers to add all the coloring. Po...

Infinite Monkey Theorem. Back in my last Project Update post I mentioned my Infinite Monkey Theorem, Animated Short that I had begun working on that was designed to showcase, Reddy, my first color monkey character for CrazyTalk Animator 3. Up until recently I had been working a little bit on the project every weekday, however the project fell by the wayside in an effort to get my Mar-Rey Sue, Desert Scavenger finished by the end of November. Now that character is finished, I think it's time to get this animated short back into my work schedule. As mentioned in the previous project update the animated short is a simple joke based around Infinite Monkey Theorem - the idea that, if you placed an infinite number of monkeys in a room, with an infinite number of typewriters, they would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. The project has been fully storyboarded for some time. When I put the project on hold I was in the middle of refining the storyboard from rough sket...