Animations, Talk about your techniques in here... Options

[JimiJimi]

Flash, Swish, Swift, Cine film and camera?

How do you make your animations? Plasticine? Or as .swf's?

Show the world your creations and tell us how you did it...

[Hobbes]

Perhaps they are too scared to show their animations in the presence of the mighty Mata?

Don't blame 'em...

[Mata]

Hey Hobbes, I've seen a game you made while your back was knackered, and there were some stories you did with a camera that I remember too. You weren't shy to share them back then!

There is the chance though, that not many people have actually got involved with animation. More power to them, I say. It eats your life.

[Hobbes]

^ Very true.

As it happens, those stories I did with the camera might be making a return. I still have the old ones, but I want to make some more because... well... they served to amuse me if nobody else.

[JimiJimi]

Hmm... I'm not too sure what eats your life more... cine or flash. Swish takes a couple of seconds to make a naff animation, whereas with flash, you get to take into account individual frames and actionscript and all the little bits. Cine, however, you need to make the models, wire them up, set up camera, lighting, but none of the other things. The only downside is you can't edit cine too well once it's done...

[Hobbes]

Flash, Swish, Swift, Cine film and camera?

What's Swish and Swift?

I could look them up in Google right now, but I might as well get a forumite to do my work for me.

[Usurper MrTeapot]

I know what Swish is, I'm assuming Swift is simular. It is in ways a simpler to use n00b friendly Flash with basic things already in it so you don't take up hours learning how to make a ball roll across the screen as its already programmed.

[Mata]

Swift is a 3D rendering package, which is actually capable of some really nice stuff, while also being low-level enough to be usable by people like me who have no idea about this sort of thing (although I did buy a book about it).

Swift also can publish directly into a Flash-readable format in a vector form. It produces images that really look quite stylish, and there new version, 4, apparently has some nice customisation options that could save a lot of work. The most recent LGG animation was done with Swift, but I then went through and individually customised every frame that it produced to match with my 2D aesthetic (there were a few thousand).

[JimiJimi]

Wow... the mighty Mata made a post... cool!

Anyway, I've done a lot of wierd stuff recently, I made Dying Guy, a small plasticine man whos body parts fall off at inconvenient moments, and the intro to Children's Countdown. On a non-animating note, I have also made a lot of reverse footage, like the indian rope trick. I got someone to stand above the camera and cut the string, and I then reversed it. Then I animated a photo of me moving up a string, and then played the forwards footage of the rope coming back down again. I did the amazing dressing trick, where my socks, jacket, shoes and hat magically flew onto me (no prizes for guessing how that was done) and the amazing paper trick, where shreds of ripped paper magically re-connect themselves into a piece of good 'ol A4.