Moho Forum

Hi. I'm a new Moho user. I love the program, and I'm really starting to get into it. I don't plan on doing anything too big, mainly stuff like stick figure fights, but nevertheless, I think it's a great program. But I've become stuck on something.

I'm not planning on recording voices for speech, so I want to use subtitles or speech bubbles. But I can't figure out how to use them at all. Can anyone lend a hand here?

There's no built-in way to automatically add speech bubbles, but it shouldn't be too hard to do. What you would do is draw the bubble background by hand, and then use the Draw->Insert Text menu command to create the text. You'll probably need to resize the text and/or cut it into multiple lines.

The next thing you want to do is have multiple bubbles that appear during different parts of the animation. You can do this two ways (assuming each bubble is in a layer of its own:

1. Use layer visibility to turn one bubble layer off and another one on.
2. Put all the bubbles in a switch group, and switch on the appropriate one at the proper time.

So, yes, you can do speech bubbles, but I would urge you to consider whether you really should. (This is just my personal opinion, so feel free to ignore it.) I can't remember watching an animation with speech bubbles that I enjoyed. Sound is great in animation - yes, it takes more work, but I think it's worth it. Or, you could plan your animation and story so that the idea could be communicated without any kind of speech at all. Like I said, it's just my personal opinion, but speech bubbles in animation feel "clunky" to me - I would leave them to the world of still comics.

Yeah, I've been thinking about doing it without any kind of speech, just stuff like sighs, things I can do with a microphone on my own.

If you need a voice actor I'd be willing to help out, I'm NOT saying I'm any GOOD but I would like the experience. I'm Dutch but can speak English. My accent is not perfect but I can do over-the-top British and American if required. And most cartoon characters have speech impediments anyway (Daffys' lisp, Elmers' stutter etc...).

Reindert.
www.nobudgetvideo.com

You can add subtitles/captions using the SMIL standard - this means creating a separate text file which is distributed with the movie, then selecting the text file instead of the movie file for playback.

Works fine on Windows for AVI and QuickTime files. The QuickTime (movie) Player supports SMIL, either standalone or embedded in web pages, as do a number of other players.

If you have QuickTime Pro (US$30), you can add subtitles/captions as a text track embedded in a QuickTime movie.

There's a MAGpie program (not the lipsynch one) that helps create SMIL or Quicktime text - see http://ncam.wgbh.org/richmedia/tutorial ... oning.html

And, of course, many video editors allow you to overlay text, which should work just as well for captions/subtitles as it would for credits and titles.

If you have Flash, you can add captions/subtitles using a plug-in - hmm, I don't know if it will work for imported SWF files, and I don't have Flash myself. You should be able to add it as a separate layer, I'm guessing.

Regards, Myles.