A Little Glimpse Part 2

I decided to post a sample Character Library to show yet another glimpse into Flash animation. A Character Library or Character Pack contains all the elements of a cartoon character; hands, eyes, mouth, body, legs...and so on. All these elements have to be drawn first in order to be able to animate a character. If this step isn't done, animating is difficult.

Now there are times when animation begins after the character pack has been created that a new hand pose or body position might be needed that will have to be added or created on the fly, but for the most part the majority of the library has been made.

Below is a sample of a character with all the parts separated out to show the complexity of a character pack. Keep in mind, this is only part of this characters library. My philosophy is to go overboard so that animation is a fun experience.

So when an animator is hired to do a job keep in mind that animation is so much more then moving characters on a screen.

Anyway, that's my two cents.

Thanks for visiting.

A Little Glimpse

You might not believe this, but animation and character design actually takes a lot of time and hard work which means I don't own a magic button. In order to give a little glimpse into what's involved with animating a character, I took a screen shot of a working Flash file showing all the individual parts of a character performing an action. Each one of those little black dots equals a movement. This one is actually very "tame" in comparison with others.

Below the screen shot is the actual character animation that corresponds with those little black dots. Crazy huh? Just click the image to see it in action.

No magic buttons here, just hard work.

Thanks for visiting.

Minimum Wage

I've been doing a lot of concept work with Ryan Hostetler of Silly Monster Media LLC lately. Below is a new cartoon teaser we've been working on. More to come. :)

Thanks for visiting.

Minimum Wage from Silly Monster Media, llc on Vimeo.