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 .

Animating Effects: The Best Form of Procrastination

Post written by Renato Vargas

If you have read some of the posts I have written here, then you already know that I have delayed the completion of my animation project for a couple of years. But during that time, I have found myself procrastinating in great ways. Yes, in not doing what I was supposed to do, I ended up learning one or two cool things, and I have to admit that I love to waste time animating effects.

Click on the image to see it in motion.
(Be patient; it takes a while to load sometimes)

Water is one of the most entertaining things to animate. It is very difficult to get right too (and I probably haven’t yet). I became interested in water animation after I first came in contact with Adam Phillips’ Brackenwood shorts. I could not believe they were done in Flash. I had to find out how he had done them. Fortunately enough, he wrote a post on his blog about ActionScript camera effects in Flash, and he posted a small waterfall scene of Prowlies At The River to illustrate his point (I tried to find the original post to give you a nice link, but I had no luck). The camera was a nice feature indeed, and I used it a lot, but I was amazed by the waterfall itself. It was in that file; all of its frames. I felt as if I had struck gold.

What drew my attention is that the final result looked wonderful and everything was accomplished with only six drawings and a hold for each of the waterfall’s elements; meaning it was done “on two’s”. He was still animating at twelve frames per second at that time (He animates at 30fps nowadays, I think). I tried to replicate the same principles with the fountain you see above these lines and I ended up with a nice result. I didn’t know I was developing a useful skill, which solely landed me all of the freelance gigs I’ve done.

There are other animated effects, besides water that never stop amazing me, like lighting effects, smoke, fire, and moving sand. The thing is that, even if they are important skills to master, they should come last in your list of things to learn, since there’s no effect that can outshine a good character animation. Character animation is the soul of your piece and it is the only thing that will say whether a story is good or not (or finished in my case). What I’m trying to say is… “stop reading and get back to those characters!! Are you done with your model sheets?” But before you go, share your thoughts about animation procrastination in the comments.