Ball..guy, and a telescope-type thing, there's a hole too.

[mbarq]

Ok, I have many guesses as to why this failed, but I want opinions.

I'll go on a step by step...kinda:

I first did my key frames of the entire animation, flip-book style if you will. So that I could actually see the movement, but in a rather cut up way, as in...well...flip book.

I then did inbetweens, so to get what I thought was going to be smooth animation. After doing so, I photographed each frame (95 in total) on my make-shift lightbox.

I edited them all in photoshop since the pencil kinda got lost.

After photoshop, I imported them all to premier. In premier, I set each on of their duration to .02 because I was going to "set it on 2s) so if I set one frame on 2s @ .02 seconds that should give me .04 which is roughly 1/24 of a second, ergo, fluid animation.

I then duplicated each one, which I didn't realize until typing this how pointless it is because I'm just duplicated .02 seconds of a frame, which I could have just easily done by setting it to .04 *sigh*

Anyway, I now have my 190 frames which I previously rotated and scaled to fit the screen since I don't use peg bars or anything really (I should really invest one, I know).

After organizing all that, I exported to .avi and got this:

L_TS53mE7Fc

[video not showing up for me, so: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_TS53mE7Fc]

I thought it was too slow, so I removed the dummy copies, went back to my 95 frames, and then got this:

jUs_CqwOF0s

[same: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUs_CqwOF0s]
I have some questions though, the first is:

I thought youtube had hi-def options, because I totally saw a hi-def youtube video of The Dark Knight, any way to enable that?

Also...What's the best format to save if you really want a lossless, quality video?

And about the animations...where did I go wrong? I think the main reason is this:

I have 95 frames, but a 15 second animation, meaning, I should really have 360 frames. That also means I am not even animating on 3s, but...on 4s!

Oh, and...any tips of equipment I can get to get consistency and be able to pipeline my animations? right now I'm working off...equipment that ain't bad, but...thanks to ma pell grant I can invest on some good animating equipment :D nothing too expensive though, I've seen those insanely priced lightboxes o.0

blargh.

[Bai Fan]

It is still too slow. Also, the lighting and paper lines are really distracting.

You don't need high def for these, their quality and lighting is so poor anyways.

Before you do anything else, buy this book.

http://www.amazon.com/Animators-Survival-Kit-Richard-Williams/dp/0571202284

I posted the link in your other topic too. It will help you.

[mbarq]

Yeah, I had a feeling it would be distracting.

I just use legal pad because it's what I have, but not really for artistic expression. I'll make the move to white paper when I can, in the meantime, I will fix the lighting on the legal pads, and draw darker!

High def is so awesome though! but I'll save that for when I get something worth hi-def :D in the meantime, .avi it is. Think I'll also upload a gif on attachments in the spirit of "for future generations even after your photobucket, youtube, website accounts are deleted".

thanks for the tips

[egerie]

Just to add to Bai Fan's advice, try to do your line tests at 12 fps and learn from there. You'll get used to it. You don't need a lightbox to animate.. Although trying to find a way to register your paper would be good. I only know animation paper though, but I'm sure it's possible to make a getho peg bar for regular punch paper.

[Bendragon]

Yeah, its still a bit slow but I also think the ball needs more squash and stretches in the impacts with the ground. And more anticipation before moving on to the next actions. There probably should be a bit more reaction time for the stick man when he sees whats happening and maybe the direction the telescope is thrown can go down first.

[mbarq]

Egerie: Yeah, think I'm going to start animating these at 12fps, at least until I get good at it. This way I can experiment more and get kind of the same results, thanks. I mean, as it is, I'm animating on 4s...

Bendragon: Ha! I totally know what you're talking about. But it goes with the same problem of how do I execute timing? Going to work on those dope sheets. What I wanted was for him to look around for a while up in the air, then jump up in a bit in shock and throw the telescope. Going to try the telescope first being thrown though, makes more sense now that I'm pretending I'm the stick man o.0

[Bai Fan]

Animate in 24fps, but on twos.