The Animating Apothecary Links to Cartoons
The following primitive examples of
animation are my forays into using Flash. Having experimented
with this software as an animation tool for about four years, I have
found it to be relatively useful, especially if you ignore the
programming and concentrate on the dozen or so functions it has that
have a direct effect on creating a cartoon. These are all in
*.swf format, meaning, in order to play them, you'll need a Flash
player, which I believe is still free and available from Macromedia
(click here for download
access). I have listed the file size and play time for each
piece, so you can estimate download times for looking at them.
My comments are provided to be of possible use to other Flash users,
or inspire notes back to me on how I'm screwing things up.
These films do not have "loading" or "play
again" brackets associated with them. They'll start up
once loaded and play until done. And then repeat. Over
and over. And over. Aieee. You may wish to "right
click" on the title and download for easier viewing.
NOTE! I have loaded a bunch of films at
mytoons.com as
well! This is a FANTASTIC location for student and independent work!
1. "West Bank"
(2004) 257KB, 45 seconds-- this silent clip was tossed together to
show misconceptions of the West in regards to Palestine, Israeli
settlements, and the Middle East for a documentary called "Such
a Simple Thing" by Rebecca Glotfelty. It's very basic
stuff, with a weekend to toss together the images and send it all off
an an email. I was still struggling to make symbols fade in and
out, fought with the software to create a decent *.mov file (forget
that--I have to take the Flash-created *.mov file and import it into
Adobe Premiere and export it as a new *.mov file to get things to
work), but the camel (a rip-off from Popeye's "Ali Baba"
cartoon from 1937) is cool. Here I learned that using
"movie clips" to define an animated symbol in Flash is a
big mistake--one, you can't see it animated unless you render a *.swf
file first, and two, it won't export correctly in *.avi format.
I henceforth created only symbols defined as "graphic."
Saves a boatload of headaches.
2.
"Brains" (2005) 731KB, 45 seconds-- very early attempt
at lip synch, the use of Flash symbols, and the "motion tween"
function in Flash. It's ok for the intended gag, but some of
the animated symbols used here are still clumsy and need to be
tweaked by a frame or two. I made use of my ubiquitious 4 x 5
Wacom Graphire tablet for drawing the images. The sound
was otherwise recorded directly to the computer, manipulated by
Adobe's Audition, and broken into about a dozen bits for each of the
animated clips. These *.wav files were then imported to Flash,
brought into the Flash timeline piece-by-piece, and the animation
layered atop them. Total production time, start-to-finish, was
about 12 hours scattered over a two-week period.
3. "Final
Pharmacology Quiz" (2005) 649KB, 90 seconds-- as an
instructor of pharmacology for the dental hygiene program at Kellogg
Community College, I am occasionally invited to say a few boring
words during the program's "pinning ceremony" each spring.
I was on holiday during the 2005 ceremony and provided this in my
place. The graduating class appreciated it (or so I was told;
I'm presuming it was short enough not to delay the ceremony), while
the upcoming freshmen in attendance were somewhat concerned about
what sort of pharmacology program they were to expect during their
final year at KCC. The music is from a 1917 Victor recording, a
selection from the Bizet opera, "Carmen." The piece
was imported as a *.wav file, layered into the Flash timeline, and
the animation added atop it. There are actually very few
drawings in this piece, since I was hurrying to finish it up.
Everything is a Flash symbol, including each section of text.
Total production time, start-to finish, was about 6 hours over a
three-day period.
4. "Countdown"
(2005) 463KB, 30 seconds-- for the animation course at KCC, I worked
up an evening of international examples that also served to promote
the Kalamazoo Animation Festival International (KAFI) in 2005.
This brief interlude served as the introduction for those bits.
The sound of a tuning orchestra is from a disk that I can no longer
track down in my office (drat), and the test pattern was adapted from
an internet download from a site devoted to test patterns (really!
check it out by clicking here), then imported to Flash, then
following MODIFY>BITMAP>TRACE BITMAP and an 80/4 pixel setting
for conversion to a passable vector graphic. The hand is a
symbol, moved about frame-by-frame on its own layer. The
appearance of the test pattern was actually done in reverse, with the
complete graphic being erased frame-by-frame, then the sequence
reversed MODIFY>TIMELINE>REVERSE FRAMES. Pretty simple
stuff. Total production time, start-to-finish, was about 4
hours.
5. Closing
Credits (2005) 542KB, approximately 3 minutes -- This piece
was the closing of a multimedia production documenting the vaudeville
performers who came to Battle Creek during the late 19th and early
20th centuries. The entire show ran over two hours, and it
included film clips of Weber and Fields, W.C. Fields, the Marx
Brothers, Sarah Bernhardt, Billy Murray, Charlie Chaplin, and this
performer, Raymond Hitchcock, who appeared in this Surreal City in
1910 in "Hitchy-Koo." There isn't much here besides
his routine and the closing credits, but I include it here to show
how a basic backdrop, a soundtrack, and some random typing can do a
more-than-passable set of credits, using Flash. Total
production time here was about two hours. Eventually all of
these clips will play a part in the ever-so-slowly evolving
documentary, "The Historic Parking Lots of Battle Creek."
6.
"Avian Flu"
(2006) 1237KB, 1 minute, 49 seconds-- this piece served double duty,
both as part of the 2006 edition of the KCC animation evening and as
my contribution to the pinning ceremony (if you do something once,
you're condemned to repeat it) for the dental hygiene class.
The music is from a 1930s recording by the Four Viennese Sisters
doing their version of Hungarian Rhapsody #2, a staple in
animation soundtracks even before it was written by Franz Lizst.
The recording was imported into Adobe's Audition, trimmed to about 90
seconds, and then imported to Flash. The cackling of the women
lent itself to the topic of avian flu, and this time the production
was somewhat longer, since I was out to employ vigorous use of
animated symbols in Flash. Sequences like the bird throwing
eggs from the car represent about five layers of animation going on
(car jittering, wheels turning, eggs throwing, etc.), and there is
some use of the Flash "masking" function in the globe
spinning bit at the end. I had just seen Norman McLaren's Hen
Hop and wanted to experiment with chickens and other birds,
animals I have not had the opportunity to sketch in the past.
Again, I used and re-used animated symbols ad nauseam here,
especially the rolling egg, and the bird in the plane. This is
about the time where I broke out of my self-imposed restriction about
backgrounds, since they represented so much extra work in my filmed
animation (the layers, the plastic cels, the time, oh the time).
This bit of fluff represents about 20-30 hours of total time, smeared
over a two-month period. However, for this production, I made
my first major use of the Wacom's CINTIQ tablet, a 15-incher picked
up by Ebay, where, joy-of-joys, I got to draw directly upon the
screen, making this the first time ever animating with a computer
where I had the feel of doing things with paper and pencil with some
degree of control over the final image...something long promised by
digital technology but never delivered since my first experiments
with it 20 years ago. I apologize for the rather large file
size...I wanted to use some old map graphics from my collection and
they were in GIF format.
7. "Jabberwocky"
(2006) 353KB, 70 seconds -- this is a student piece from my animation
class. I first searched for a download recitation of Lewis
Carroll's poem, and couldn't find anything I really liked, so I sat
down and recorded it into Adobe Audition, made it sound like I was a
breathless ogre, and broke it into 14 sections, one for each of my 14
students that semester. Students being students, three of them
failed to turn in their assignment. So I filled in the blanks.
The music is from Greig's "Peer Gynt," recorded for
Columbia records in 1917. The music track was imported as a
*.wav file to the Flash timeline, and this time I used the meagre
audio editing functions in Flash to create a fade in and fade out,
with the entire music track volume being cut to a 50% level.
More stuff coming as time permits.
The Animating
Apothecary
PO Box 1325, Battle Creek MI 49016
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Email Jim
Middleton (jimmiddleton@juno.com)