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Daydream - The Master and his Cat clean the kitchen

Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 6:12 am
by Touched
Well, I was really down to the wire on this one. I had to cut 1 shot in the "cleanup" montage, and even then I was late by at least 5 minutes on the deadline.

http://www.drowtales.com/mainarchive.ph ... ate&id=840

This is the last of the 3 Drowtales segments I've been working on. As usual, tried some new things, notably the soft shading. But I didn't have time to make it look good on Faen, so there's a little abstraction there. A few other places I had to cut corners to get it done on time.

Oh, something I forgot to mention, I've put playing controls in the SWF, so if you click inside the movie, you can then use your arrow keys to fast forward, rewind, or pause.

Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 1:35 pm
by DarthFurby
I've enjoyed everything you've posted so far Touched, but this latest clip you crossed the border from not bad to WTF!!!!????

Backgrounds, voice acting, blocking, staging, dialogue, music, special effects, direction, camera work.

This one had it all. But most importantly, GREAT characters.

Strong character driven pieces are the best kind because the audience never gets tired of watching them over and over, unlike story driven pieces.

Oddly enough the character animation is the weakest of the three clips, but for pure entertainment value?

Easily your best work. No contest. Prepare for a flood of attention.

To everyone else: Look how freakin fast he put this together. With programs like Anime Studio we're gonna see a growing trend of big studios losing talent to independent animation. Why slave away for a studio when you can be your own studio? Today's technology is making it a reality.

BG's

Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 3:13 pm
by Patrick McClintock
Awsome BG's. Did you use a paint program or are your back grounds hand painted?
Excellent job. I was just tackling BG's myself!
Digital or not your painting skills are tremendous!!!

Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 3:33 pm
by Touched
DF, it's reactions like yours that make the lost sleep worthwhile. ^_^ My last few days have been a blur of 3-hour sleeps and constant coffee intake.

And you're right about the character animation. It's a shame I didn't have an extra week or two to spend on this, so I could have given it more life, expression, and originality of pose. I can see it growing weaker closer to the end. Lesson learned for the future when I know time will be short -- Start animating with a good scene at the beginning, then skip to the end and work backwards from there!

But I agree, taken as a whole, these 3 DT animations are the work I'm most proud of, ever. And it would have been extremely impractical without Anime Studio.

The rigs in this bit were frankly a mess. In the end, I resorted to a lot of brute force point-pulling to keep the forms from falling apart at the seams.

@Patrick, I can't take credit for the backgrounds, other than chopping them up for multiplaning and extending them for pans, and combining them to make different looks. The backgrounds were painted by a Drowtales artist named Donny as it mentions in the credits. I'm not sure if he used Photoshop or another program, but I know they were digital, not physical media.

Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 9:27 pm
by Genete
Sometimes I cannot believe you're using Anime Studio... Every time a watch an animation that I know it is completely done in Anime Studio I search in it the "how did he did it" or "how can I do the same" in a learning sense. With your movies I can't... The storytelling is so perefect and the characters so alive that I cannot follow the story and think about "how (the hell) did you did it" (particles here, bones there, point motion here, masking there...) Wow! it exceed my boiling brain!!

Congratulations.
Genete

Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 9:28 pm
by Gnaws
DarthFurby wrote:Backgrounds, voice acting, blocking, staging, dialogue, music, special effects, direction, camera work.

Prepare for a flood of attention.
What DF said. Not sure how many hours went into this project, but the results are outstanding. Excellent editing and camera work.

Looking forward to your next.

Cheers.

btw - how long did this take to put together?

Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 11:43 pm
by Touched
@Genete: Oh, I assure you, the animation was entirely in Anime Studio. I of course used a few other programs for the non-animation aspects of these segments. Sound Forge and Audacity for the sound (Audacity's noise reduction feature is the best I've ever encountered!), Photoshop for the aforementioned backgrounds, the fish and golem cutouts (animated in AS with dynamic bones), Adobe Premiere to put all the rendered shots together on the timeline with the soundtrack (extremely buggy old version, crashed frequently).

I can't think of any tricks I used for these that I haven't discussed here on the forum, so if you're really stumped, just ask which part you're curious about. We're all using the same toolbox! :)

@Gnaws: Thanks for the compliments. As for how long it took, the file date on the oldest file for these 3 projects is March 3. This was the last of the segments I started working on -- I did a few test shots early on (the "rebuilding my home!" and "we shall clean the kitchen!" shots), so the oldest file for the Master.anme character rig is dated March 4.

After those shots, I set this sequence aside until I'd completed the Ariel & Faen segment. At that point I was planning to resume work on this, and created the base cat .anme file, which is dated April 9, but didn't start animating anything with it yet.

After creating the cat, the next day I decided I'd better get the Ariel's High Sorcery bit done first instead since it was going to be the first one to be shown online, so I stopped working on this part again until April 19, when that was done. Most of the dates in this project folder start around April 19. So, adding about another week and a half to account for the cases above, I estimate about 2 weeks to complete the Master & Cat segment.

These were not normal days, however. As I mentioned earlier, I was sleeping only 3 hours a night in the last few days, and overdosing on coffee and junk food.

Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2007 8:14 am
by p6r
Fantastic !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

6R

Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2007 1:40 am
by Horganovski
WOW!

Beautiful work..

Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2007 8:59 am
by ulrik
Fantastic work Touched! :D

Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2007 11:00 pm
by jorgy
That is great! Wonderful story, great characters, great animation! And in a short time!? Excellent job. I'm very impressed and in awe.

jorgy

Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2007 11:11 pm
by Touched
Thank you all! :-) I'll be sure to post my progress on my next project as soon as it gets started. I have another one coming up with the soft-shading style like this one, and another cel-style like in my avatar.

Posted: Tue May 08, 2007 1:21 pm
by Patmals
I watched some of your work but didn't comment. i am sorry.

good stuff! please continue! :)

Posted: Tue May 08, 2007 9:43 pm
by LittleFenris
Since you have plenty of glowing responses, I'll toss in an opinion.

I think the girl looks out of place since she is cel-shaded and everything else, even the other characters are soft shaded and more painterly. other than that I think it looked pretty good.

I think the camera work was one of the strong points of this piece.

Posted: Tue May 08, 2007 11:05 pm
by Touched
Yeah, probably no one mentioned it before because I already stated in the first post that it was something I didn't have time to fix. I share your opinion about it.