Zlogspot - animationandvideo

Lonely Planet's Best Ever Video Tips  is a pocket book guide to video creation for beginners and intermediate video creators alike. It may also have a few ideas for video creators used to filming in one specific area or style looking to branch into other areas. As you would expect from a Lonely Planet book it's specifically targeted at people on the move, shooting video on location, whether that be on assignment or just on holiday. As such the book is ideally sized to fit in a pocket or in a (camera) bag without taking up too much room or adding too much weight (at just under 130 pages). Tips range from preparation prior to heading out including camera choice, accessories, making a plan and more to technical tips such as how to shoot various types of scenes, composition, lighting, talking to the camera and improving your audio among other things. Creative tips are discussed; how to connect with audiences, vlogging in public spaces, finding stories etc. along with editing advic...

The Comedians - by TET.  Over 20 years ago I had the idea to create a comic strip that was based on the stand-up comedy of three fictional comedians. It was one of those bursts of inspiration that never got any further than headshot drawings of the aforementioned cast before being filed away. One of the reasons I bought the latest version of Reallusion's CrazyTalk 8 is that the promotional videos showed it being used to create 3D, talking head versions of cartoon characters. Something I thought might be an easy way to put my own characters into animation. I was reminded of that recently so I thought it was time to give it a try. Remembering my comedian characters I thought, that's the ideal place to start with talking head characters. Hat-wearing Comedian. Of the three character designs, the one I liked the most was the hat-wearing comedian. I knew I'd purchased just the right hat in one of the content packs for CrazyTalk 8 so I felt a good character likeness was possible....

Creating Animation with Clip Paint Studio EX. In a marvellous piece of serendipity, SmithMicro released a free update to Clip Studio Paint EX (formerly Manga Studio EX) that included Digital Cell Animation. Clip Paint Studio EX is my preferred illustration tool and, in my last blog post , literally a day before the update was released, I talked about figuring something out with Manga Studio in order to create digital cell animations of my own. Apparently the Japanese version of the software received the update earlier in February (I think) so this release was for the English version of CSP. Unfortunately the feature is so new there is no English video tutorials showing how to use it (and only one Japanese video that I could find). The release notes kind of explain the various features but that's it. The manual doesn't mention anything at all. (At the time of writing this there is an updated English  start-up pdf guide here  that runs through the basics). Fortunately the basic...

Lil' Peepz TET... I miss you. For some time now I've only been sporadically posting to this blog, which has been personally disappointing, as I've tried to make this and my Writing About blog something that I consistently update with new content on a weekly basis. Whilst I've been more prolific on my Writing About blog, I don't have the same broad scope to write about almost anything I choose here. This blog is devoted to documenting my personal animation projects and things that relate to my work, such as reviews of software I'm using, tutorials, animation tips and, occasionally I'll feature other animators work that I've discovered too. Typically, I post more often when I have an active project on the go. Unfortunately I haven't really had an active project on the go for months because of my commercial animation work . It's the same story of freelancers everywhere. When you get busy professionally, all personal projects fall to the wayside. I...

Reallusion released the newest version of its CrazyTalk software during December 2015 and I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a free copy CrazyTalk 8 Pipeline version after buying a truckload of Reallusion content in order to get the special deal. If you're not familiar with CrazyTalk it's basically specialized software for creating and animating talking heads quickly. CrazyTalk 8 extends the original capability of creating a semi 3D head from a 2D image to creating true 3D heads that can be imported into iClone and Reallusion's new 3D Character Creator (Pipeline version only). Since the original function of creating a talking head from a 2D image is pretty much the same as CrazyTalk 7 I'll be focusing on the new to CrazyTalk 8 function of creating and animating a true 3D head/talking avatar. For a quick overview of this function watch the video below. With anything that lets you create any kind of custom character my go to project is to try and create an avatar ...

For a book that was last published back in 1987, Screen Acting, How to Succeed in Motion Pictures and Television by international Australian Actor and TV show host Brian Adams is remarkably not very out dated at all. Except for a few organisation names which may or may not still be the same and actor salary tables the majority of information in this book is still as relevant today as it was back in 1987. You may be wondering why I'm reading this book? Well, it's one I bought as part of a directors course I completed back in the mid 1990s and never read. Now that I'm seriously back into animation and doing some of my own voice acting I figured this book would probably have some good pointers. At 373 pages it's packed with information about every aspect of acting from how to break into the business through to TV studio floor manager hand signals, director speak and more. A chapter that particularly stood out to me was the one dealing with vocal exercises. I'm challen...

iSK CRU-1 USB Studio Condenser Microphone If you're serious about animation or video and plan to record your own voice for narration or characters, sooner or later you're going to want to upgrade from those cheap, $12.00 gaming mics, that you can buy from most variety stores. I'll admit I don't know what makes for a good microphone having nothing for comparison than the $12.00 cheapies - and I'm too lazy to actually visit a real audio/music equipment store to test equipment out. Which is why this is only a 'kind of' review. The way I see it, almost any professional microphone is an improvement on what I've been using so it's hard to go wrong. I did know that most serious microphones tend to connect to your computer via a USB cable so with that in mind I started Googling around for Professional USB mics. What I finally settled on was an iSK CRU-1 USB Studio Condenser Microphone  which I purchased through Swamp Industries as a pod casting package deal...