I'm new here and I'd like to show you my first try with animer studio pro.
I had to make this little cartoon to announce the second pregnancy of my girlfriend.
I didn't have much time to experiment as i Had a really short deadline and not much free time so my first tests became the whole thing.
Everything was 'drawn' using ArtRage 2.5 which is an amazing tool at a price so low it looks like a steal (version 3 add things I didn't need).
I can't draw at all and never been able to, so the tracing function in ArtRage helped me a lot!
Also I didn"t want the video to look like most flash animations, with flat colours and gradients so ArtRage did a great job to provide that "painting" look. It was so easy to achieve!
After the puppets and the set were drawn and painted, everything was animated using anime studio pro which so easy to use if you ever used things like photoshop and premiere.
I edited in my Premiere CS3 and used Magic Bullet Looks to add some white diffusion and some film damage/vignette to try to add a bit of a film look insted og a CGI cartoon. It was difficult to find a good balance in the post effects but I think "Looks" was a good tool for the look I was trying to achieve.
The font used is from LucasArts earlier games such as Monkey Island.
I didn't have much time to work on the sound, which is sad as I actually work in post sound
In my youtube videos, you can find earlier version of my tests with puppets being a bit different (with visible black straws for each limb, just like the puppets I had when I was young) and some tests with Looks parameters.
Tell me what you think of the final result
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hli2kbzvcL8