Base14

A dangerous combination…

And by “boredom,” I mean with all the other kinds of work presently surrounding me.

While drawing last week’s comic, I decided to turn on my screen recording software and crank it down to capture one image of my screen every second. Then I brought it into Premiere, set it to play at a standard 30 frames per second, added some music and cut out a few lull periods where I was fiddling around with dialog boxes. The resulting video is a time-lapse of the full creation process for a Base14 comic, at 30 times the actual speed! I have to admit, it kinda makes me want to start time-lapsing everything I do. Enjoy!

It’s about time for another animation round-up from my fundamentals of animation class. Now that the quarter is coming to an end, we’re getting into the more serious stuff, including our first character animations. We got to animate a frog side step, a walk cycle and a run cycle. I’m beginning to see how the trick is to break down the character into several smaller components, animating each part on its own. That is, at least until I can track them all simoutaneously in my head. I can tell you one thing, it’s giving me an even deeper appretiation for all the advantages of Flash, and how it keeps you from getting lost in pagination semantics.

In the third installment of our character animation series, I walk you through the basics of using onion skinning to create frame by frame animation in Adobe Flash. I also touch on my personal workspace setup preferences and how I use guide layers to help develop key poses. Oh, and you can download the .fla right here. Enjoy!

In what might be a weekly series, I present part 2 of “2D Character Animation in Adobe Flash.” Today’s lesson takes our 2D character we rigged last time and demonstrates how to apply some basic principles of animation via tweening techniques. This includes easing, squash & stretch, anticipation and overlapping action. Most of these methods I developed while animating Biological Warfare Ain’t Easy and Ara, and effectively standardized during production of Duck ♥ Teslacoil. I think this tutorial comes off better than the last one. And since I can’t seem to get the HD to work on YouTube, In addition to the HD video stream available on YouTube, I’ve packaged a high-res version of the video along with the .fla tutorial file. Download it right here.

Today’s tutorial was brought to you by Base14 apparel. Why not pre-order one of our lovely new kite shirts today? Made from 100% shirt.

Hey everybody, quick update and some new videos!

First off, the tutorial posted earlier this week, “Character Animation Tutorial – Part 1,” is now not available in HD, since I discovered YouTube’s strict requirements for HD video the video rendered 6 minutes too short. Maybe I’ll switch to Vimeo for future tutorials?

Second, I’ve tossed out into cyberspace two more animation projects from my principles of animation class. We did a weighted sack assignment to practice weight and tension and a sliding seaweed assignment to practice anticipation, elasticity, waveforms and overlap. They both came out pretty well. I feel like I’m learning fast but never quite fast enough.

I’ve been wanting to get into the free tutorial business for a while now, and while my well-documented robot instructions were a nice beginning, our company is probably better suited toward software tutorials. So today we get our feet wet with Part 1 of “2D Character Animation in Adobe Flash,” featuring the lovable Duck from our upcoming animated short film Duck ♥ Teslacoil. The tutorial assumes the user has basic operating knowledge of Flash symbols and tweening. And even if you’re still new to how Flash works, I keep it pretty straightforward. If you’d like to follow along at home or in the lab, you can download the corresponding .fla right here.

I’m wrestling with YouTube right now to get an HD version of the tutorial up and running. The site is mysteriously vague on how to feature HD videos… probably to keep their servers from being swamped with five thousand HD videos of cats sneezing. Update: HD version is now live!

And please take a look below at the wonderful apparel Alysha has been designing for our merch store. These shirts are gonna be all the rage in a year’s time, and you want to be able to say “I wore the shirt before it was popular!”