Expanding Skillset: Video: Projects: Animation

People are "drawn" to animations. For this project, you'll have the chance to stir our emotions with your expressive motion drawings!

• How do you make an interesting story from a sequence of images that depict motion?

What am I making?

• An animation or animations with understandable stories; if it needs explanation, then explain your story about it!

  • Examples from FlipAnim and Brush Ninja

  • Example Animation page like you would make for this assignment

  • History: A Brief History of Animation is good for the early Western history; History of Anime - Part 1 - The Beginning shows how it developed in Japan; The Awesome History of Animation has interesting early examples; for nerds, The Fascinating History of Animation

How do I make it?

• Articles: wikiHow shows good basic step-by-steps for the animation process (with paper books, but applies to digital)

• Videos: this is for hand-drawing a flipbook, but the principles apply to digital drawing tools that simulate flipbooks

  • interesting trick - video the motion you want to show, then draw from successive video stills!

• Tools: #1 Brush Ninja or #2 Drawn or #3 FlipAnim

• Advanced DMA project: Use Brush Ninja to Rotoscope a Video Sequence (Video Tutorial)

  • Use onlineconverter.com/video-to-jpg first to convert a (trimmed!) movie file (.mp4 or .mov) to a sequence of still .jpg images.

  • Or, do YouTube full screen and pause and take screenshots (Command-Shift-3)

• Tips:

  • 8 frames (drawings) per second at least will make the motion smooth enough; most tools seem to default to 10 FPS

Steps

1. Brainstorm: List some ideas, draw some sketches for a short animation story

2. Choose a Tool: there are 3 listed above - which one is the best fit for you? Or is there another tool you know?

3. Draw each Frame: From beginning to end. The tools have "onion skins" which let you see the previous or next frame as a faded template, to assist you in drawing the next movement. Figure about 10 frames per second. If your animation will be 5 seconds long, that's 50 frames. Find ways to speed up your drawing and re-use content from other frames!

4. Test your Animation: Play using the tool's interface, and make any adjustments.

5. Export: Create an animated GIF file or get an embed code (one of the tools does not let you download an image movie file)

6. On Google Sites, under Pages, create a new page called Animation.

7. Add your downloaded Animation image. (Or Insert "Embed" if you got an embed code)

8. Write about the story behind your animation and also What You Learned.

9. When done, push the Publish button, review the settings, and publish.

10. Then click the chain-link button, Copy the link for your page, and turn in the link.

Career Connections

• 2D animation has a lot of career applications! And when you do 3D, the principles of story are still helpful.

Resources

• Lots here at AnimationResources.org