The Weekly Filmschool: Animation Numero Dos
As the end of the semester looms like a freshly detonated whale carcass on a nudist beach, I have decided to do an equally ambitious animation as my previous cel project. This time, however, in digital.
I have a bit of a personality flaw. It forces me to try and be better than everybody else. Not in a constructive way where I simply want to excel, I just don't want others to outshine me. So when it came time to decide what to do for a final project for my Digital Animation class, the choice was simple: do a 12-minute narrative of equal quality to something you'd see on TV. It's perfect in that nothing like this has ever been done at this college, and it cheeses off the beatnick, avant garde, latte-swillers that make of 98% of the film school.
So how does one create such a thing? Is it even possible to do in less than a month? We'll see on both counts. I'll be posting updates of my progress over the next month, and then post the final product on April 30th.
In the meantime, here's some material to better know the characters I'll be using:
Synopsis:
Lars gets fed up with constant power outages during a heatwave, so he builds his own nuclear reactor. But with increasing numbers of horrifying birth defects and frequent meltdowns, the neighborhood seems to be getting more and more hostile everyday.
The main software program I'll be using is Toon Boom Studio. It's a vector-based animation program. Vector-based means artwork is created by mathematical equations rather than pixels. Adobe Flash and Illustrator are also vector-based.
I'll go into greater detail in the coming weeks as to why Toon Boom is so great, but I'm sure some of you right now are wondering "why not just use Flash?" Flash, while pretty powerful in it own right, was never designed with animation in mind. Its interface can be extraordinarily frustrating when trying to do complex animations. Such as, for instance, Flash does not have a camera. Which makes pans, zooms, and tilts unnecessarily complicated.
Flash's main selling point is it's cheap, and if you're doing simple animations, it's generally good enough. But if you want to do a lot with as little effort as possible, it's Toon Boom all the way.
