Goldfish - We Come Together (animated music video finished)

Fulkster · Post by **Fulkster** » Tue May 10, 2011 9:00 pm

...love your storyboarding!

(Even if I vote late, I voted for the lighter colors, too.)

Mikdog · Post by **Mikdog** » Wed May 11, 2011 9:53 am

Thanks man.

Here's a more pronounced version:

Pleased to show a little 'making of' video before its release:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pblMKuuplCY

I have hours of screen recorded material. I may put it on a DVD along with PSD and AS files if anyone's interested.

DK · Post by DK » Wed May 11, 2011 11:38 am

Hi Mikdog.
Have you discussed how you do the PIXEL outline technique in any other threads? If not I would love to know how you do it?

Cheers
D.K

Mikdog · Post by **Mikdog** » Wed May 11, 2011 5:22 pm

Hey DK.

I read this site by Derek Yu:

http://www.derekyu.com/?page_id=218

As well as loads of other online tutorials. Here's some more I found useful:

http://www.qubicle-constructor.com/wordpress/tutorials/

Specifically:

http://www.qubicle-constructor.com/word ... art-basics

(Qubicle Constructor was used by its creator to do the slow-mo 3D voxel bar scene by the way. Have taken link down, but full video should be up in around a week and a bit).

In short - get a 1 pixel pencil in Photoshop, zoom in really close to a small document (I worked @ 200 x 113 pixels, scales up to HD 16:9 pretty well) and then go for it. It REALLY helps to have a good idea of a rough or something as its easy to get lost in that small detail. I used a Cintiq to draw stuff, sometimes rough at first, and then as I read somewhere else, pixel work is more like sculpting than drawing in many ways. It is TEDIOUS ay ay ay but if you just try drawing something without a plan...well, I guess it can work. It helps to figure out how much detail you'd need. Say you need to see the pupils of a character, maybe draw that first otherwise down the line you'll figure out that WHOOPS you don't have enough pixel to put in a pupil without making the whole eye black, etc...

Also when scaling up or down in Photoshop its essential to use the NEAREST NEIGHBOR interpolation, not the default BILINEAR. And you gotta scale up and down in exact multiples of the image size. So if I have a sprite 15 x 20 pixels, I'd scale up 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 ... times. Not 1.5 or anything else I'd end up with the computer trying to figure out where to put 'half' a pixel. So, 30 x 40, or 45 x 60, or 150 x 200, etc...

Was an interesting exercise in minimalism, I may have even gone SMALLER than 200 x 113 pixels, something I want to try for another project, like 20 x 13 pixels and see if its still possible to get something interesting out of that. Surely it is.

Then I upscaled to 1600 x 113 for Anime Studio as the pixels don't look too good when rendered in AS.

Genete · Post by **Genete** » Wed May 11, 2011 7:41 pm

Just for annoy the folks a bit.
You can obtain all that pixel-art effect from Synfig itself without any external application:
http://synfig.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1468
In this way you can obtain smooth movements with aliased rendering.

-G

Mikdog · Post by **Mikdog** » Wed May 11, 2011 9:12 pm

-EDIT-

Ok I replied earlier with my Blackberry without seeing the link first. The resolution is much higher than what I did. I wouldn't call it pixel work. Looks more like an aliased image. With what I did @ 200 x 113, you can clearly see a whole pixel. One pixel could be a whole pupil, though a similar pupil on yours looks like around 20 x 20 pixels. So while I think your examples are pretty cool, its really apples and oranges you're comparing. I'd be interested to see how well that same character would translate to 15 x 15 pixels. I think you'd have an unrecognizable coloured blob and may understand the need to do it pixel by pixel.

-EDIT 2-

Out of interest I took your example and sized it to 40 pixels and zoomed in. As you can see, kind of messy. So it'd work at the much higher resolutions you have there in the link, but as soon as you get down to pixel working resolutions, the computer's not smart enough to figure out what's an outline, what's an eye, what's a fill colour ... human intervention needed.

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Genete · Post by **Genete** » Thu May 12, 2011 7:20 am

I took your example and sized it to 40 pixels and zoomed in...

That's the wrong way. The good way is to render it from Synfig Studio to that size not downscale the rendered image. Although, I believed that the idea was to create at low resolution and then upscale to high resolution and not the opossite, right? If I take one of your original images and downscale to 40x40 with a raster editor, it would have the same garbage result. I don't know if the result will be or not so good as directly drawn with 1 pixel size brush, like you do, but as I said, I was just repliying to annoy a bit

I'll ask the creator to send me the original source file and see what can I do.
-G

Mikdog · Post by **Mikdog** » Thu May 12, 2011 3:35 pm

Well, some of my sprites are originally around 40 x 40 pixels which is why I used that number.

Not sure why you say you're annoying, I'm totally open to finding a better or faster way of doing things. I'd be interested to see if you can get the original vector file of that example and render it around 40 x 40 pixels, and may upscale to 200 pixels to make things bigger and more viewable for web.

jahnocli · Post by **jahnocli** » Thu May 12, 2011 5:05 pm

mikdog -- thought you may be interested in this, you 8-bitter you:
lemming

[EDIT] oh, and see if you can track down a stop-motion film called Koghead and Meatus -- the backgrounds especially reminded me of your designs.

Mikdog · Post by **Mikdog** » Thu May 12, 2011 7:58 pm

Ha ha. Big 3D blocks of different colours to make a pixel animation. Cool! I suppose that really is 'post-modern'.

I watched Koghead and Meatus. Yep, those backgrounds look pretty similar to the ones I did in HappyLand - Alien. I liked it, ha ha. Pretty wacky. Found it on YouTube.

madrobot · Post by **madrobot** » Fri May 13, 2011 5:54 am

Wow Mikdog
My jaw broke my toe on the way down
Awesome work dude

Mikdog · Post by **Mikdog** » Fri May 20, 2011 2:00 pm

Thanks so much for all the help here.

Final video:

--
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-tNUur2YoU
--

If you're from Germany and the YouTube version is blocked for you:

http://www.vimeo.com/goldfishlive/wecometogether

I've also put together a rough explainer video of how I made it. Any crits on this would be welcome:

(removed)

Here is the 'making of' video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz1_MQnw5WA

And here is the 'making of - extra' video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pblMKuuplCY

2ner · Post by **2ner** » Fri May 20, 2011 10:21 pm

Great work! Lots of fun.

Although the 3D lego bit and the claymation bit were both very good on their own, I personally find that switching media creates a discontinuity. Maybe that's just me.

Anyway, you've made another great, uplifting little movie. Congratulations!

neeters_guy · Post by **neeters_guy** » Sat May 21, 2011 1:43 am

With a vid like this, you just strap yourself in and hang on. What a ride.

That making-of vid is a great extra (using AS for the 3D car sequence ... who'da thunk?).

Fantastic work, Mike!

Fulkster · Post by **Fulkster** » Sat May 21, 2011 4:33 am

Wow... I'm amazed!