Production
Phase I
Character Creation (Modeling)
Before any animation could begin, I needed to model (draw) the submarine on the computer using the animation software's drawing tools. I did this by scanning in a picture of my character ("bubbles" the submarine) and tracing him with the drawing tools in Moho. I then added “bones” to my submarine. Bones give me the ability to manipulate him like a puppet. Bones make the job of animating a character very easy. Here is a screen shot from Moho with bubbles and his "bones" in place.
I can bend the bones, therefore bending "Bubbles". Here is a sample.
Here is a picture of "Bubbles" from the front. Notice there are a lot more layers in the layer window (right side of screen). "Bubbles" has become more complicated with eyes that move, and air bubbles that rise around him. Note the two bones in the center of "Bubbles". Bubbles' movements from the front are much simpler than from the side.
Moho makes animation easy once you have you character drawn, and your bones set-up. In animation terms, this is called "rigging" a character. Many animation programs use this same type of bone set-up to move objects. The real power of an animation program however, comes from its ability to "in-between", commonly referred to as "tweening". To better explain tweening, lets talk for a moment about how the animators at Disney animated by hand years ago.
Hand drawn animation (Cell animation) was drawn by artist called animators. They would not draw every pose of a characters movement. They may only draw every 3rd, 5th, 10th etc. They would have an assistant called an "in-between" artist that would fill in the in-between poses. The animator and in-between would only draw line drawings of their characters on paper. These line drawings would later be traced onto plastic sheets called cells (named cells because of the cellulose sheets that were used). Then the back side of the cell would be painted with the correct colors. These cells would then be laid over a color background and photographed. About every 24 pictures or so would make up 1 second of animation! A lot of work and man power to create a cartoon! Disney had many people working to ink (Trace) and paint the cells.
Enter the computer. The computer can use mathematics to figure out what in-between pictures between 2 points might look like. Programs such as Moho do this by using a technique called Key framing. The animator poses his/her character in Key poses and the computer calculates what the in-between poses will look like. The animator can also tell the computer what colors the characters should be painted with, what textures or shading they should have and the computer will apply them. Once the animator is happy with the animation it is then Rendered.
Rendering is when the computer takes all of the information the animator entered about his/her animation, and generated the still frames that make up the animation. Some animation programs can even generate a video file. Moho for instance can render a QuickTime digital video file. The still frames, or video file can then be composited (put together and turned into video) in a video editing program. I am using iMovie, but there are several other option. On the Macintosh computer iMovie comes standard, but you can buy Final Cut, a higher end video editor. In the windows platform Windows movie maker comes standard. You could also upgrade to Adobe Premier (window or Mac), also a higher end editor. There are also several free or cheap video editors available, these are just a few of the more common ones. I will discuss video editing in more detail in my post-production section.
My next step is to start animating the scenes in my storyboard!