Hi everyone,
I would like to post this entry to share the things that i experienced throughout a very
small budget commercial project, mostly done with AS and Premiere for the final compositing.
This might give the new user an idea, what they will have to go through.. And it might
become "a Readme Fist Topic" so as not to make the faults that i made through out the entire
process.
Let me give you what i was capable of to give you an idea about my experiences . I knew AS
since it was MOHO. But never used it before. I am an experienced multimedia programmer and
Video Editor. Have lots of idea about animation and its dynamics.. Made very small
animations for the games that i made with Macromedia Flash.
If you don't have much time to read or get bored skip to the final "AND FOR THE FINAL WORDS
WHAT I LEARNED" part, to get the conclusion. But i suggest you to read the whole article.
For the first i would like to say that i accepted this job to gain experience over AS and to
startup doing some real job with it. I suppose to have, real schedules and stress. So i am
not dealing with the low budget of the project and i do not think it is worth to mention it
here.
It was a job for a friends friend.
THE PROJECT (And the story underneeth)
The client at the beginning asked for me to create a short animation (1.5-2 min) to be
played a wedding ceremony. This clip would be surprise for the couple. Everyting was ok.. It
was short and was not meant to be a so complex one...
At the beginning we talked and agreed to make it st. like Southpark with very less
movements. Then I made the mistake of showing the client, the bone system of AS ( I was
trying to convince the client that this could be done easily with this software.) Time was
short and there was alot to do (Which i learned later on). And i absolutely admit that i
calculated everything wrong.
At the first meeting that i had, we talked about the things that might occur throughout the
animation. I asked for a scenario which there was none.. It was ok though, we worked through
and created a small scenario for 4 scenes.
As described to me, the bride was dealing alot with hinduism and we went over that idea.
Shortly after we had st. like this.. (It was more detailed but let me give you the idea)
There were 2 weeks for the whole thing to be done. And i was able to get the last scenario
10 days earlier. The drawings were ready done by another friend of mine with Freehand. I was
able to start doing st. with AS 7 days to deadline.
1- Opening... The camera zooms out to see 4 people (with bride) making yoga.. They start
dance with hands and head
Groom comes to scene with his horse from the left.
Camera cut to bride eyes boing out
Camera cut to groom eyes boing out
Camera cut to general to see groom and bride standing and fly to come together
A carpet comes flying undernetth them and they land on it
2- Flying with carpet, showing places over the photo of a landscape ( there were 2 of this
scene)
3- When they come and hover over Taj Mahal, bride sitting in front surprises and hits the
groom to fall thumbling over the carpet. Holds the tail of it. Bride realises and gives a
hand to groom to hop on carpet again..
4- Approching of carpet to a garden near the Palace scene (No landing)
5- Bride and groom make a dance together, bend the heads, then bride runs to the back of a
tree and groom follows her to the front of the tree. Then a tiger (Brides cat) comes from
right to scene to stand and roar to groom. Groom panics and steps back and bride jumps
forward to calm down the tiger ( Switch to close up to see the name of the tiger at its
label on the neck)
6- Final. From left groom comes on an elephant. Bride comes on tiger. Bride lands on ground
and walks towards the elephant. Groom gives a hand to bride to hop on the elephant at he
back of groom. Grom waves hand. They switch to behind view to go along the long road to
Castle. At the time being there is a crowd of 50 people wait then cheer. As they cheer we
cut to general and to closeup panning of the people applausing to see their faces.. We
switch back and fort to make it more active as you watch..
7- Credits
As you see i started with 4 scenes which ended up with 7 (It was more than 7, 8-9 maybe with
the closeups or so..)
AND NOOOOOWWW ACTION
The first struggle was with freehand.. Since it was drawn in freehand i had to convert every
drawing to Ai format. In which i realised that there was no problem.
And then i tried to import the Adobe illustrator files to AS where the problems were
started..
1- The lines and the curves was a mess. (I search through out the forum to see that it was a
normal thing to happen)
WHAT SOULD I DO: DO NOT IMPORT ANY VECTOR TO AS UNLESS THERE IS NO OTHER WAY(I even
tought of redrawing everything from the beginning.)
2- Every line and its fill become different objects inside AS ( Again it was something that
might happen. Which causes you have to edit both the lines and to fills, which is twice a
work..)
WHAT SOULD I DO: Either clean every thing in AS, or clean them while in Freehand or
Illustarator. (Thats wiser), and then add border line data inside AS
3- CMYK-RGB Problem... (Colours were changing to brighter colors)
WHAT SOULD I DO: Either repaint everything in AS, or make another import, which passes
through MAcromedia Flash to get the correct color data
4- Degrading fills causes AS to crash..
WHAT SOULD I DO: Clean all the degraded fills to simple color fills, then refill them in
AS. This is because, when you import a degraded color filled object to AS. It will try to
create the same object in different degraded colored objects (30-50 or more) Which will
cause the software to crash.
5- For the crowds I placed several characters making different cheer action (applausing
waving etc.). I grouped them by 10 person at a time. Added BMP heads cleaned from photoshop.
Which was a pain in the ass there were 40-50 peoples to do and even replacing the sources of
the head images was hard. I had to resize all the heads and reposition them one by one since
their sizes were different.
WHAT SOULD I DO: I should have organized everyhting from the beginning make the heads
match sizes in photoshop. So that i shouldn't need to make adjustment in AS. I should have
created characters with complete motions needed, then just select the act that i needed for
them.
6- And for the rendering... In the final I realised that there were lots of timing problems.
and it was taking a looooooooong time to render multiple characters with that much detail to
render a single frame. Which caused me lots of problems in the over all time of the whole
poject.
WHAT SHOULD I DO: I should have make more preview renders to make smooth acts for
the characters at the beginning. I should avoid using lots of characters with bitmap heads
in one scene
AND WHAT I DID
1- Left the quality of drawings as it is, talked to client to leave them as they were (Since
it was a funny cartoon only)
2- I made minor changes to main designs. When moving a control point tried to select the
control points both on the outline and filled shape.
3- Left the colors as they were talked the client agreed..
4- Cleaned them up in freehand try to make the desings as clean as possible.
5- I have done as i described (I shouldn't have done it like that) which was almost killing
me and the project, because of delays for the deadline of the project.
6- I again did what caused me a lot of problems.
AND FOR THE FINAL WORDS WHAT I LEARNED
PRE PROJECT
1- Make a very detailed schedule and ask even more time to complete the job. You can never
guess an exact deadline and there is no turning back.
2- Dont forget to add rendering times. And the time needed to compose the animation in a
video editing software. You will also need time to add sound effects, music and make
aditional cuts and composing effects (mix,wipe,titles, etc...) And you will have to render
it once if you need. And convert it to DVD,Divx etc..
3- Try to minimize the project as much as you can. Even your client wants from you
everything to move and fly etc. (As much as you can manage)
4- Try to get as much data as you can from the client. Both for the scenario and the
animation sytle (Drawing style and details about the animation style)
5- If you can, agree about everything for the final before beginning to make anything. This
is to ,not to leave any misunderstanding, about what you are expected to do. And try not to
do anything extra or less.
6- About the budget don't expect the client to understand you and the hard work you are
going to do. And ask for the exact money you need for the job to be done.( I am leaving this
up to anyone to judge for themselves, to earn less, more or the price that matches).
7- Do not show anything what you are not capable of to the client to get the job. Then you
will have to do it.
8- DO NOT GET THE JOB IF YOU ARE UNSURE ABOUT ANYTHING. Then you will have to be responsible
for anything that goes wrong and no one will be satisfied. Especially yourself.
PROJECT
PREPARING MATERIALS
1- Prepare a plan if you can.
2- Make the drawings yourself if you can. Or assist the artist to show him how to draw. He
or she might not know how to draw something suitable for AS and animation.
3- Draw everthing in AS which is more suitable and correct for the animation to be done with
AS.
4- Create the bitmaps according to the resolution you are going to do. You may have to zoom,
then the resolutions will have to be higher, if not calculated you will end up with blurred
backgorunds
5- Make everything match with sizes, if you plan to create multiple same type characters.
6- Becareful with the boning, since it is harder to adjust later on.
7- Again if you are going to use multiple characters and want the bones to match take care
about the bone sizes and etc.
8- Give a name to everything, you will need them as the project gets bigger.
ANIMATING
1- Create all the needed acts for the characters at the beginning, and add them to character
2- When you duplicate the character to create another copy, it will be copied with its
original acts and timing. If you want them to make extra movements, you may have hard time
to add their new movements. ( I had alot of trouble doing this.) You cannot copy an act to
another character. Don't forget that...
3- Prepare every character on different project files, then import them to the scenes as you
need. It will give you more control to edit and replace them if needed.
4- Keep everything as simple as you can. You can do everything but keep the rendering times
in mind. That will cause you more trouble afterwards.
5- Make as much prerenders as you can while creating acts for the characters to have correct
timing. Software preview is not useful if you have lots of details.
COMPOSING THINGS TOGETHER
1- Think about the scenes and prepare them in different sub projects. It will give more
control over the scene and easier to use and render. (I had started mine as a single project
but then i messed up everything. I was not able to find, what is where and, to see the final
timing i had to make huge renders. Which takes painful time.)
2- Dont hasitate to create lots of scene and sub scene even for the short closeup cuts. It
will help you to adjust the camera easily and make less faults with the camera movements.
(Once, i had forgotten a camera keyframe which i had to spend 30 mins to find where it is,
to clean it up. It was making a silly small movement after a closeup)
3- When you create a copy of a previous scene, make a careful check to cleanup all the
keyframes since they will cause unwanted movements. If possible create a "no-keyframe"
template scene with characters in place. Or leave the final keyframes to protect the final
positioning of characters and etc.
4- Do not group everything under each other then it will cause you to loose time when you
want to edit something inside.inside.inside etc..
RENDERING
1- Choose the right codec to use. (I had to make 3 loong renders to find out which works
best to finaly edit them in Adobe Premiere)
2- Make preview renders as much as possible or when needed.
POST PROCESS
With Adobe Premiere "Indeo Video 5" codec with 100% compression worked fine with me. It was
not taking lots of time and the quality was good. Worked well in Premiere (No blurring, or
interlace lines, skip frames etc.)
In the end, i managed to complete the project within 10 days of time. There were just a
couple of hours to film to be showed at the wedding anniversary. And I was only dealing with
the animating and rendering part. There were 2 people dealing with the drawings. 2 person to
make the editing and making it happen during the wedding.
Thank you for reading soooooooooo looooooooooooong entry i hope it will help you before you
start a project. I will post a small low rendered version of the movie, in a couple of days
for you to see what was i dealing with.
Do not hesitate to ask anything about this story.. I will be happy to share this
experience..
A long story of a newbee Anime Studio (Moho) user...
Moderators: Víctor Paredes, Belgarath, slowtiger
First rule above all others....
Never take a paid project and use untested or new software.
If you do it anyway make sure you have enough time in the deadline for training... at least double the amount of time or more.
All of the problems you had can be linked to that one single issue, lack of experience with the application.
-vern
Never take a paid project and use untested or new software.
If you do it anyway make sure you have enough time in the deadline for training... at least double the amount of time or more.
All of the problems you had can be linked to that one single issue, lack of experience with the application.
-vern
