How to do a action toon?

[NightmanGX]

I have just watched Star Wars: The Clone Wars and I am wondering how they do the light saber battles and if it is possible to do something similar in Anime Studio or just any kind of fighting or sword fighting animation tips or techniques.

[rplate]

I have just watched Star Wars: The Clone Wars and I am wondering how they do the light saber battles and if it is possible to do something similar in Anime Studio or just any kind of fighting or sword fighting animation tips or techniques.

Funny you should ask. I just started working on a sword fighter in ASP.
I intend to have her fighting a dragon.
I wasn't going to put it out there till I was done but, you got me anxious to show you what can be done.

Have a look at what I did so far.
What do you think? Comments welcome.

http://homepage.mac.com/rplate/Sites/girlfight.swf

[Rasheed]

Two things:

• it's like she's standing on a rubbery floor, because her feet are going up and down during the body turn
• her head is a bit too late in the action (just a frame or two)

BTW I think the problem with rotoscoping is that all viewers are experts. We immediately see imperfections. Therefore, as an animator, you're raising the bar even higher than with cartoon animation.

[human]

The only thing harder than animating two characters fighting would have to be two characters slow-dancing, because you've got to coordinate the characters so closely.

I know--I'm been working on this for a week now.

In order to "just DO" your swordplay project in a reasonable amount of time, (and with watchable quality!), you should rotoscope it (using the image-processing techniques I've described for feature extraction.)

First stop: internetarchive.org

Once there, looking up "sword" in the Moving Image archive doesn't work very well, but looking up "pirate" turns up a gem:

http://www.archive.org/details/captain_kidd

I haven't watched this movie, which has a reputation for being excellent, but I assume you can find reference footage in it.

If not, keep looking.

[human]

Recently, Internet Archive began offering streaming video for selected clips.

As a result, I can confirm that "Captain Kidd" provides feature-grade footage for swordfighting.

Go for it!