Now that I'm freelancing I use lots of my spare time for thinking about self-marketing and stuff. I want to become einfachanimation.de a bit more famous or popular or whatever, but at least more attractive. Anyway, I thought it would be lovely to re-design its header and insert an animation there because, well, it's simply about animation. That's why I started to play around with software again. I don't like Flash so much because it offers no free standards and there are those annoying websites full of flash animation which need a beeping long time for loading even with a broadband connection. It seems to be a kind of anachronism to go back to animated .gifs. Maybe it is. But as long as I am not familiar with Canvas I'd like to give it a try.

Sometimes I just miss technical archievements and so it happened that I had never made an animated gif before. I asked Aunt Google for a tutorial on animated gifs in Photoshop and I found a nice one through which I digged yesterday. It was very easy and I followed the instructions straightly. So, here is my little rocket:



Today I tried something more fancy and to do that I wanted to use the transformation tool to change my character's size. But: if I try to transform a group or layer, it'll be transformed in every frame of the animation where I used an instance of the original layer in. So I had to adjust or better, design every single layer containing transformation. Which is nearly as much work to do as in any other 2D animation. But it was great fun. I guess if I would get tired of animation, I already had. The walk animation is a bit crappy but apart from that I just like having all the resources of Photoshop.



Though gif files are of very small size, they'd get bigger and bigger the more fancy your design is. Gifs are limited to a maximum amout of 256 colours but if you're playing around with the options of the "save for web" dialogue you'll see how it works. They're tiny if you only use black and white or a few colours and it depends heavily (as it seems) on how many frames the animation consists of. My little rocket is made of fifteen frames with 256 colours and 100% Dithering, while Mr Männeken is made of 43 frames and 256 colours and 100% Dithering. The size of the canvas of Mr Männeken is twice the size of the small rocket. The rocket is 48 KB, Mr Männeken almost 250 KB. By the way, a lot of software is capable of saving images as gif. A nice (and free) alternative to Photoshop is Gimp.

Questions, anyone?

From time to time I work on my Orpheus film project again. The last time doing this I found myself in front of many things to do with a huge lack of an overview. By accident I got a hint for a nice software called Celtx which helps you organise your media project. It's designed to be helpful with theatre, film, comic and audio book pre-production. I downloaded it and was willing to give it a try. Though looking very complex at first glance it worth to overcome the very first confusion. They included some examples of other people's work so if you don't understand the workflow instantly, they would help you to understand.

The pictures are links to bigger versions of the screenshots.

You have different areas for organising your data. There's a main catalouge for every project for an overview on everything. You could add a script and from its structure the software will derivate the storyboard's structure, for example. There you can upload pictures, add text and shots and reorganise the action. My favourite tool here is the play button, it generates a kind of Animatic and you can check your film for consistance and major mistakes in storytelling.


In the script itself you can mark actors or props as in a normal text editing software. It will appear in the sidebar on the right where you could choose if it's an actor or a prop or whatever. So if I mark Orpheus and label him an actor he'll appear in the main catalogue and I could add information there. Like contact information or in my case what the puppet must be able to do. Lovely piece of software...

It's seems to be very helpful to people working in bigger productions than to me and my one-man-crew. You could use it server-based as well and everybody registered could log in and see what he or she could do next. You could use its production timetable and handle all deadlines there. If you are going to use it with a bigger crew you'd have to pay for it. If you're going to use it on one computer alone it is for free. It's an open source project and the developers offer it for nearly every operating system. Like nearly anybody else, the developers blog regularly. I'm pretty sure I missed some good features so far but by having a close look to their website, you'll get any information you'll need.

Within one day I now have a clear view of what needs to be done, a beautiful and printable storyboard and an animatic. I now just have to do it.

At the university of Applied Arts in Vienna, I attend a lot of courses on subjects which are not animation related at the first glance. I do font design and typography here as well as book binding next to flash animation or media theory. To me, Graphic Design is an important part of Screen Design as well. I often don't want to use already existing things and that's why I'm learning how to do them myself – not always on a pro level, but enough to understand what'd be necessary.

Due to the font design class we had to develop a display font while we were also learning about the history of using fonts and typography, how to digitalize it and finally, how to do some kind of final presentation. I made a small book (because now I can... hehe...) containing a disc with the True Type Font file generated with Font Lab software and a tiny piece of animation to show how it might me used.

Referring to all the other things I'm currently interested in, I call the font Styx, like one of the rivers of the ancient greek underworld. And while doing so, I remembered my character's concept drawings and came back to work for the Orpheus project. A part of the story will be taking place in the underworld, and I had the idea to make this part a silhouette film like i.e. Lotte Reiniger did, or Anthony Lucas in The Mysterious Geographic Explorations Of Jasper Morello which is a beautiful steampunk silhouette film made in 2005. They combined traditional puppet animation with computer generated backgrounds and compositing.

Doing the font presentation was also helpful to me to understand that I certainly wouldn't do the silhouette animation digitally but definitively animate the puppets by hand. I did some silhouette animation on a lighttable under a rostrum camera in the studio here before which are supposed to be posted next week. The advantage of software is, it's clean and easy as long as you know what to do. There are a lot of disadvantages to, like a hurting neck after several hours in front of a screen, cold feet, slow machines rendering even tiny pieces for ages, and software which is not doing what you want because you both truly speek a different language...

And CG keyframe animation simply isn't as great fun as animating with my hands. I love working with my hands which is one of my reasons for doing the book binding course. And I can control the animation so much more if I don't have to think of these abstract things like a timeline and keyframes... It's much more natural to me to simply move things further in time. With the software you can go back and forward and you doesn't have to care about your next steps since all is removeable... It always seems to be weird to me, although I sometimes really like to spend several hours in front of my computer until my neck is hurting.

So here is the final font animation and with this, my CG silhouette test:

For all of you who don't speak German, there are to pieces of text in the clip, which could be translated like this, "River Styx. It cycles Hades nine times." The text is very small and due to the extreme bastard type I designed, hardly readable in this size. I copressed the original PAL standard format video to the web size and .flv format, so you may excuse this.

I did the keyframe animation in After Effects. The problem is that the software would interpolate the keys in a linear way. But natural movement, however, would never be just linear, it always has an ease-in and ease-out, speaking in software terms. For example, an arm moving starts slow, getting faster to its highest speed and then slowing down until it stops again which is determined by how our muscles working. Spectators often don't really know but have a unconscious awareness that a linear animation would always seem to be unnatural or to us. So I changed the software settings to interpolate the keys with bezier curves which is a more natural way the things would move. The music was composed by Felipe Vila, a friend of mine who is going to be responsable for the Orpheus soundtrack.

Supplemental: The Styx clip in higher resolution is now available on my vimeo website.