Trying to decide which design to go with. This will be for some cartoon comedy shorts about 2 rappers (who are ethnically neutral- they're blue after all). The first will be a "music video" of the duo.
Design #1:
Design #2:
The first one is kinda "what you see is what you get". Not much life to them, just simple. I made the second one thinking a more cartoony look would make them more interesting. I'd give them exaggerate expressions and have detailed movement (I've already built an AS model of the skinny one with bone dynamics added to his hair, and fully posable fingers).
I figure since I'm the animator and I'm not getting paid, I'll do them the way I want- which is the 2nd design. But I was just curious to see what other people thought- judging from the negative comments on youtube of my cartoony family guy animation, it seems people would rather watch a lifeless cartoon...
I think I'd have to go with #2, because it looks more defined as a style and has more life as you said. I think the negative comments on YouTube don't necessarily apply to this, because in that case you were altering existing, well-known characters, and in this one you're introducing them on your own terms.
As rapper I like the first one. As drawing style the second one is more elaborated. But more alaboraetd don't mind better... Sometimes clean drawings and a simple but effective face and body expresions are better than a very accurate drawing. I cannot imagine the second one singing a rap song like the first one did in your previous example.
Best luck.
Genete
Out of those designs, definitely the second one. The second design has a style to it, the first just looks like a bad drawing.
As for your Family Guy animation, I think its the fact that you picked a bad, repetative sound bite of Peter, not that your style or the animation was particularly bad. I have every Family Guy DVD and thats not one of the better soundbites you could have chosen to animate to...not to mention he doesn't have much life or secondary motion other than the lipsync in that animation you did.
I decided to go with this- a modified version of the 2nd design:
Seems to be 50/50 on what people prefer... so I kinda toned down the 2nd version. For the larger fellow, I like his basic look in the 1st design better- I just need to draw him better. If you can't tell, I drew the 1st in AS and the 2nd in Flash- I'm still trying to get used to drawing stuff in AS. Last night while I was trying to sleep I had images of points being dragged around in my head...
Youtube always out-syncs my audio... argghh. The music video will take place on a cruise ship with lots of different scenes of them on board- I'm still thinking up antics and shenanigans for them to be doing. I'm getting pretty ambitious about this- which means I have lots of more drawings to do! (I get to draw hot blue chicks in bikinis- yay!)
Another question: What's the best way to animate to a 3 minute song? Break it up into scenes and bring them together in a video-editing program afterwards? Or sync the whole 3 minutes in Papagayo and do all the scenes in 1 AS file? There's going to be a lot of cutting back-and-forth between scenes (pool, club, spa, pool, spa, club, cabin, etc).
By all means do it in separate scenes. This way you'll have much more control over everything, and don't run into memory or performance problems. Doing sequences with pingpong cutting can be done in two scenes of equal length, which will be cut into pieces once evrything is fine.
