En Garde!

Today, the creativity bug bit me and I decided to write a scene for a small series idea I had a while back. I intended The Deadly Truth to be one time gag comedy short, but as time passed by, I became more interested in making it a small story, told in a few episodes. I also decided to change the tone of the story from humorous to a bit darker. Here’s a quick sketch of the direction I’m planning to take.

If anyone is interested in script writing  in a more professional way, I encourage you to take a look at Celtx. It is a pre-production all in one software that will blow your mind away. Absolutely free, and available for Mac, Linux/Unix, and Windows.

I was in a creative accident!

Post by Renato Vargas. Follow me on Twitter.

I’m fine though, don’t worry. I hope you are doing great too. I just wanted to let you know that Sbass and Monica from The Inkwell Alley were kind enough to let me share some thoughts with their readers on Feature Friday. They are creating an awesome community of artists that want to make their creative dreams come true under the motto Is not who you are, it’s who you can become. A writer and an artist, these two great women have been very busy promoting their relatively new iniciative, that I know will be a great success. Make sure to check out their blog at http://inkwellalley.blogspot.com.

If you are coming from The Inkwell Alley, welcome to I’ll tell you a story…. In this blog I share the things I learn while trying to figure out how to make drawings come to life through 2D animation. Since blogs tend to be a bit difficult to navigate, I thought I’d show you around. You might enjoy these posts:

Creativity development

How I’m fighting the animator’s block

The Importance of Staying Creative

The production process

Building Character is not the Same as Character Development

From A Forgotten Piece Of Paper To Life

Illustration tips and tricks

Creating Stunning Backgrounds with TBS!!!

Animating Effects: The Best Form of Procrastination

Backgrounds: Getting your perspective right with Google Sketchup

Backgrounds: From Google SketchUp to Toon Boom Animate

I hope you enjoy this blog as much as I love writing it, but above all, I really want you to find it useful. Any thoughts? Make sure you let me know in the comments. Have a great day!

To do list

Post by Renato Vargas. Follow me on Twitter.

Hello everyone. I have a few things that I want to share with you (although I won’t just yet). First of all, I want to show you The Deadly Truth. Its release is loooong overdue. I thought that was going to be an easy thing, but once again, having a demanding day job and (yes I know) not enough discipline has pushed that deadline endlessly. The purpose was not perfection; just mastering Toon Boom software. Shame on me. After my work trip to Holland, I came back to a lot of backed up work that just had to get done. Things are more relaxed now, so I’ll get right on it. Along with The Deadly Truth,  I want to share a series of posts regarding the various stages I went through to create it (including all the things that should have been done in another manner). In The Netherlands, I met with fellow animation enthusiast Voynitsky, so in the following days you’ll see a post about our conversation and some of his work. Great guy. In the past days I’ve been getting a lot of traffic directly from gooogle, and the search terms that keep coming up are “toon backgrounds” and “animating water”, so I decided to write detailed tutorial posts on how I go about doing those two things. Even if it’s only from my amateur experience.

My purpose is to make this blog as informative and useful as possible so that animation enthusiasts everywhere can benefit from my learning process.

So, over the next couple of weeks you can expect the following:

1) Completion and release of The Deadly Truth.

2) A series of posts about The Deadly Truth’s production.

3) My conversation with Voynitsky and  some of his work.

4) Tutorials on “toon backgrounds” (indoors and outdoors) and “animating water”.

[Update:] I don’t like posts without visuals. After all , this is a blog about visual storytelling, so I want to show you the animation that got me started with this hobby back in 2006. It was done for a challenge at animationforum.net, run by Greg Kapersky. The challenge was called Dance Off and we were given a one minute piece of audio called Lalla, from the album I Have a Small Penis by M. J. Katamajäki to which we had to draw a character dancing. Go figure. I did it in Flash MX and had a lot of fun doing it, so here it is (opens in a new window):

 

Dance Off by Renato Vargas. (Click on the image)

I want to thank everyone that has kept coming back to this blog. It’s been great having you here. Don’t be shy, leave a comment .

Things are back in track

Post written by Renato Vargas. Follow me on Twitter.

Now that things are back to normal, here’s a quick update of The Deadly Truth. This link takes you to a facebook version of the video that looks better than Youtube’s. While you are there, you can always befriend me.

Here’s the Youtube one, which for some reason is one second shorter than it should be. Just a taste:

Note: I’m thinking of releasing the Toon Boom Animate source files for this animation once it’s published so that everyone can learn from my mistakes, so stay tuned!

Because stuff happens

Well, Sunday has come and The Deadly Truth is not finished. This may sound like a “my dog ate my homework”  type of excuse, but these past two days were extremely hot where I live (not in the sexy way) and my computer couldn’t take it. Apparently, something overheated (past fry degree) and it won’t start. Now I have to wait until Monday to take it to the repair place and hopefully, it’ll get fixed over the course of the week. I have another computer (an old laptop), but since it doesn’t have an NVIDIA card that’ll satisfy system requirements, it won’t work with Animate. Luckily I always return the licence after every use (due to fear that someone will break in and take the computer), so it’s not locked in there with the broken down machine. Hopefully the hard disk isn’t damaged and my files are still there. If things aren’t fixable, I’ve been toying with the idea of buying a MacBook Pro, ever since I read this post from the one and only Chris Georgenes, who recently “made the switch” from Microsoft to Apple. This might just be the signal I needed. Anyway, this is going to be fixed in the next couple of days, so I’ll move the release date for next Sunday. The idea is to work fast and not worry about little details. Of course, your computer not working isn’t one of those :-S.

The Deadly Truth

Release date: Sunday, June 7th, 2009.

In the meantime, take a look at this character update I posted on Twitter a couple of days ago:

The Deadly Truth: first update

My little clip is coming along nicely. Backgrounds are close to done and rough keyframes are in place. Everything on schedule. Progress!!

 

“The Deadly Truth” will be released on Sunday, June 7th, 2009.

Edit: For those interested, I will post more quick updates through Sunday on Twitter. You can follow me here.

Coming to a web browser near you: The Deadly Truth

Post by Renato Vargas. Follow me on Twitter.

I decided today that it is time to become Toon Boom Animate literate, and there’s only one way to do that: animating. For that reason, I decided to make a clip, under one minute in length due next Sunday, May 31st. No excuses. I am aiming to do it as fast as possible, and to use multiplane, some symbols, couple of effects, and frame-by-frame character animation. It’s going to be called The Deadly Truth.

So far I roughed out the setting, set up the multiplane shot, and drew some poses. I hope I have some fun making it. Afterwards, I’ll write a couple of posts about the experience. For now, check out the rough BG:

 

Title: The Deadly Truth
Release date: Sunday, June 7th, 2009.

Backgrounds: From Google SketchUp to Toon Boom Animate

Post by Renato Vargas. Follow me on Twitter.

Hey there, just want to show you some stuff. In my last post I showed you an application called Google SketchUp. Since it’s an incredible tool to develop three dimensional models of whatever you want, I thought it would be a good idea to use it as an aid in the creation of two dimensional backgrounds for animated shorts. I’m still working on the outside shots I showed you before (I’ll post how those turn out in another post) but I’d like to show you how SketchUp is of great help when it comes to drawing perspective. You don’t even have to think about vanishing lines and what not.

We start off with a fairly simple Sketchup cube and with the push/pull tool we create a two wall room (or set). After that we pay a visit to the 3D Warehouse we populate our room with a suitable bed and a nightstand (although here I just modeled this “placeholder” as nightstand). Don’t forget to punch a hole in the wall for our window. We paint everything white, move our view around to get the best shot, and snap a picture (export an image). I’d like to point out that SketchUp is full featured software, so it is capable of much more than these simple things I’m doing. I want to keep the models simple because afterwards, the painting portion will take up most of our time. We end up with something like this:

 

We then import our image into our drawing software (in my case, I’m using Toon Boom Animate) and put it on it’s own layer. After that, it all becomes about “imaginative tracing”. Use your SketchUp lines as guides and make sure you keep every drawing in it’s own individual layer (you can group things afterwards). How about we start with the footboard. You can color as you go, or you can color everything when you’re done.

 

Now some courtains…

 

Now the bed and we improvise a nightstand using our SketchUp placeholder as a visual aid (don’t mind the shadows; that step comes afterwards, but I forgot to take snapshots without them ).

 

And we finish with our walls and the window. At this point you can color everything. Your aim is to accomplish a certain atmosphere. After all, we’re trying to tell a story…

Make sure you build up a nice atmosphere with every layer you paint.

 

I’m falling in love with SketchUp more and more. It’s an incredible tool that can save you a few hours. You should give it a try. How do you like our final product?

Leave a comment.

Backgrounds: Getting your perspective right with Google Sketchup

Post written by Renato Vargas. Follow me on Twitter.

When I started with this hobby, I didn’t think doing backgrounds for my animated shorts was going to something to worry about. After all, they were the portion of the whole thing that didn’t (generally) move, right? Plus, I considered myself kind of artsy and I had done a few paintings, so I thought to myself: “How difficult could it be?” I didn’t expect the answer to be “FREAKING HARD”.

As it turns out, creating backgrounds for a short is no walk in the park. It’s not that you have to learn about color, or drawing, or composition, or even effects (which you have to do, though, sorry). The problem with them can be summarized in one word: consistency. That’s right, if you want your backgrounds to frame your animation effectively, you have to be consistent, and as I soon realized, that is one difficult thing to accomplish. When I was a kid, my dad (a civil engineer) taught me how to draw two-point perspective and since then, that has become a bit intuitive for me. However, if my camera looks at the same scene from a different angle and I have to draw that, everything gets screwed up, because it is very hard for me to get the layout right from a different view. I end up with a coach that lies at twice the distance from a coffee table, for example, in comparison to the first shot.

ENTER: Google SketchUp

SketchUp is a 3D modeling application that you can download for free from our friends over at Google. It has many capabilities, but what drew my attention is how easily you can get seemingly complex models done, with just a few clicks. It’s tools are not very intuitive, but the learning curve for them is ridiculously short. With the instructional videos from screen name: SketchUpVideo and 4sketchupgo2school on YouTube you’ll be able to do very nice things with it in a couple of hours (make that three). Some animated series like Futurama, use 3D sets rendered with toon shaders that make their three dimensional objets look like 2D drawings. That’s certainly a nice way to use 3D, but an expensive one, and not the one I want to try out.

You see, I want to draw my backgrounds myself, but I’m going to get SketchUp to tell me where everything goes, and as a bonus to help me out with the perspective. My project takes place near a well-known church in the city where I live, so I want it to be present throughout the short. Unfortunately there was no model for it on Google Earth so I had to create it myself. As I wrote before, it is not complicated at all, once you get the hang of it. The two tools/techniques I used most in this case were the “Push/pull tool” for extruding every structure up from basic shapes drawn on the ground and the “Follow me tool” for mouldings and spheres. Here’s a panoramic view of what I created:

This took me a little past three hours to complete,
including the time it takes to learn basic SketchUp.

In a 3D space where you’ve made a mock-up of your set, and marked with big blocks where your buildings, nature and props go, you can quickly move your camera to explore what shots work best for your project. Not only will you get the correct layout, but you’ll also get your perspective right in every shot. A nice feature of SketchUp is that it lets you apply a photograph as a texture to any surface. In my case, that lets me visualize more clearly what I want as an end result. I browsed through flickr and found some façades that give me a better idea of the direction I’ll take. Let’s take a look at a nice establishing shot:

Which is based on this original rough sketch:

What if we climb on top of the chapel or take a look across the street?

What next? You can’t use these pictures for your project. No matter how cool it was to craft them, they’re still a long way from finished, so the next step is to take these and import them into your image editing application and paint your scene on top of them, using the blocks as reference for the position of all your objects and using the lines as perspective guides. However. we’ll explore that in a different post. Hopefully, this technique will ease up the process of drawing consistent backgrounds. Have a great day!

Leave a comment.

What about a real site?

I have been considering turning this blog into a standalone website, and now that installing (and maintaining) Wordpress has become easier, well I went for it. Guess what domain I bought? Yes, you got that right. For the moment I’m fiddling with the overall look and feel of things so it’s not operational, but Wordpress is up and the theme and theme manager are working. I’ll move this blog there and I’ll add a new feature, that I hope you (and some more peolple outside the current reach of this weblog) will like. I can’t wait to show you some new cool things. Hopefully, you’ll have a nicer visual experience, coupled with the high quality posts you’ve come to expect from “I’ll tell you a story…”. Keep checking for updates here.

In the mean time, take a look at this background I did some time ago, when I started this project. It was done in Flash, and I like it a lot, although the original .fla file was lost in a very very stupid way.

Background done with Adobe Flash.

P.S. A lot of you keep contacting me on my e-mail address. Not that I don’t appreciate your input, but I would rather see it in the comment section of every post, so that everyone can join in on those nice conversations about animation as a hobby. Have a great day!

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