Zlogspot - animationandvideo

Jimmy the Superhero by Gary Pye. Reallusion announced the winners of their Animation@Work contest this week. I was fortunate enough to take away one of the three Best Video prizes up for grabs with my promotional video for my new Animation 4 Business Premium Service . I'm now the proud owner of a copy of Magix Movie Edit 2014 Premium Edition software. Whilst I was obviously hoping for the major prize, there are indeed a lot of talented CrazyTalk Animator users out there. Watch the Competition, winner announcement video for a good cross section and preview of all the winning entries. I did pretty well considering I only started learning CTA2 properly last December. Whilst there were many great entries I was very happy to see the winner, Garry Pye, won with a very funny video about Superhero Training. Regular readers and viewers of my work will know that Superheroes is a recurring theme. Gary is also a fellow Aussie and creates content packs for CTA that you can purchase for use in...

Today I decided to run through the next two of Reallusion's iClone 5, Quick Fix Tutorials, How to create my own character and How to create a talking character . Both tutorial videos are very short so click the links if you'd like to watch them. BTW: If you haven't read Part 1 in this series, it's not critical but you will see my first iClone scene and will be able to read how it was constructed. As mentioned previously this series is my experiences of learning iClone and is not intended as a tutorial. If that's what you're looking for then I'd recommend you watch the tutorial videos I'm using as a basis for these blog posts. Creating My Own Character Photo of me used as the basis of my iClone Avatar. As someone who casts myself into a lot of my own videos it's always useful having an avatar character that represents me. So that's what I decided to create. Initially I started with a photo of me that was well lit but my face was not directly fac...

With iClone 6 (check out the embeded video at the bottom of this post) currently in development and me having bought iClone 5.51 in December of last year I thought it was time to start learning the software. Especially now that my confidence with Reallusion's CrazyTalk Animator 2 is much higher and in a more stable place. Note that if you've found this post expecting tutorials, I'm sorry, you won't find them here. This is my journey and experience of learning iClone 5.5 for anyone who may be interested in buying the software but aren't sure if it's going to be too hard to learn. This will probably turn into a series of articles as I'm writing it during my process of learning and not after the fact. I can only write about what I've learned. If you do have iClone 5.51 and want to follow along I'll be working my way through iClone 5's series of Quick Fix starter videos . From Reallusion's website: iClone 5.51 is a real-time 3D animation too...

Remember Xtranormal ? The site that said "If you can type, you can make movies." Although its online studio was very limited it was still pretty good for making short, dialogue driven videos with visually interesting 3D characters and backgrounds. Here's a reminder with one of my best Xtranormal videos using some of their Star Trek based characters. I enjoyed Xtranormal quite a bit but its pay as you publish business model and the need to purchase themes made it expensive. Particularly if you graduated to the downloadable desktop version, State , which gave you more functionality, increased possibilities and an even lighter bank account. Last year, around mid 2013, Xtranormal closed down its website with a promise to rethink its business model and maybe make a come back. As it turns out Xtranormal is no more. Its intellectual properties were liquidated and, early this year, sold to a new company called Nawmal . Presently Nawmal is still in the process of assessing how be...

Plotagon's Jane Character. I've briefly reviewed Plotagon's Animation Tool before as part of my Six DIY Animation tools post and wasn't very impressed. At the time I hadn't really looked very deep into what Plotagon could do. Now that I have had further chance to really explore the software I can safely say that Plotagon will likely be frustrating for anyone with any film training at all. I say that because, even if you'd had the most basic training in the art of film making, Plotagon is going to frustrate you with it's rigid placement of actors locked camera choices and step by step interpretation of your script. But let's back up a bit and look at what Plotagon is attempting to do. Plotagon simplifies the film making process by linking what happens in your movie directly to the act of writing your script. Fig 1. Plotagon Script Interface. Scripts are set out pretty much in the standard screen writing format. Choose a scene, place up to two characters...

Animation 4 Business Premium is a new service I'm offering as part of my Business Explainer Video Service, Animation 4 Business . To launch the service I've created the short video below that explains why you might use my Premium service over solutions like GoAnimate and Powtoon. The video is also entered into Reallusion's Animation@Work contest too. Essentially it's for those situations where you need characters to perform specific tasks unique to your business but you don't want to go to the full expense of creating a custom character from scratch. Visit my site or email me if  you'd like more information. This blog however is more concerned with the behind the scenes stuff of how the above animation was created. So lets get into that. From start to finish this animation took three days including writing the script, designing my new Animation 4 Business logo, animating the characters and scenes and adding sound effects and music. Note that I didn't storyb...

My latest CrazyTalk Animator 2 short is a variation on a video I created several years back called Where's Your Helmet?  That video was inspired by the quote Life's Tough, Get a Helmet that I wrote an article about in my main blog . This time instead of stick figures on a white background, my new animation is set in an office and uses Reallusion's G2 Power Tools characters and props. Watch the animation below and then read about the behind the scenes stuff afterward. This animation was made over five days from writing the script to uploading it to YouTube. With it only being one scene I was able to make the entire thing inside CrazyTalk Animator's studio. As with my previous CrazyTalk Animator productions the actual animation is still very unnatural in places. The result of trying to mash predefined character motions with my own adjustments to get something closer to the movement I actually want. I could probably create much better character animation if I created the ...