Moho Forum

First attempt at a series I have in mind. I allowed myself luxury of experimenting between image and vector based, not sure if the mix of styles is pleasant. Everything done in ASP 9 and Gimp.

http://youtu.be/Hjz4MaCgLVE

Voices are created from TTSApp for now until I can get some people to do them. I would be most grateful for any volunteers !!!! (just using built-in laptop mike and an emailed .wav ??? )

Thanks ahead for any feedback/suggestions

edit 2014-10-11: P.S. Million thanks to those offering help with voices. You don't have to time your voice to match current voice in animation, just match words, I can adjust the timing. Super great to get help!!!
Link to dialogue:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/591 ... alogue.txt
Explanation of what happened in this episode:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/591 ... nation.txt

This is a pretty ambitious piece, LOTS going on!

The mix of styles didn't bug me, in fact in most cases it looked good. Some of the more extreme zooms showed some extreme pixelation on the lines, but that was about it.

The auto-generated speech was a distraction for sure, especially on the third character to arrive (the one on the airplane). I couldn't understand anything he said. The music seemed a little varied and also became distracting. I love me some Judas Priest, but "Breaking the Law" kept changing in volume all over the place. Also, many of the sounds kept panning around. This worked well for the airplane sweeping overhead, but overall sounded a little odd.

I can try to help with the voices if you'd like and please don't get discouraged by anything I've said, this was well put together and nicely animated.

Danimal wrote: The music seemed a little varied and also became distracting. I love me some Judas Priest, but "Breaking the Law" kept changing in volume all over the place. Also, many of the sounds kept panning around. This worked well for the airplane sweeping overhead, but overall sounded a little odd.

I keep forgetting the default mode for sound is spatial positioning, argh!!! gotta remember to uncheck that box. volume change I was trying to accomodate the dialogue, thanks for feedback on that I will look at other methods.

Danimal wrote:I can try to help with the voices if you'd like and please don't get discouraged by anything I've said, this was well put together and nicely animated.

Not discouraged! grateful to receive such good feedback, very glad you liked how it was put together, and yes it would be friggin' awesome if you would want to help with any of the voices. Here is a link to the dialogue:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/591 ... alogue.txt


Thanks again Danimal !

Danimal wrote:This is a pretty ambitious piece, LOTS going on!

I'd say BEYOND LOTS going on and extremely ambitious.

But, I think for some experimental work this does a really good job of showcasing the ideas and style options. I would say that isolating a specific style would be of great benefit because you already have a lot going on it seems storywise. Of course without actual voice actors, and with rough editing there's no clear sense of tone or pacing for the story. It feels simple, clipped and quirky, but dialogue feels written as if it is to be more complex and serious with "subtle humor"

Refine story, refine style.

It looks like you have some art skill to bring to the table, (though I feel it's obviously stronger with scenery--and at times "perspective" drawing--rather than character art or character animation, with this example at least) But I appreciate your attention to detail: animated shadows, footprints in the sand etc.

I actually think the art style is the most interesting in a couple slugline framing shots. esp at 1:26 with the stylized perspective as the leaf floats down (to what unfortunately seems to be a large tiger-cat because of scale, only to be a regular sized cat later.) Not sure what's happening with the helicopter, but the whole shot plays out well visually. (And the segment of Afternoon Delight with the cat meow highlight was "delightful" )

I'd say play to your strengths, and make sure the story is solid. Even if that means having your characters less animated.

Hell, I'd even offer up some vocal tracks just so you don't feel stuck with TTSapp for some reason--and if you promise to always take an extra look at spatial positioning with EVERY scene. (though, in your/everybody's defense, it really shouldn't be the default selection)

Good luck.

Thanks very much ddrake your feedback is tremendously helpful, I will do my best moving forward to keep your points in mind. Yes, as you very correctly surmised the dialogue I had in mind would have been more complex but I needed to overly abbreviate it, because of working with the digital voice app. In a way this was an experiment to see what could be done completely solo, animating everything -- even voices -- but digitized dialogue falls short since dialogue with a good character voice is so much more than the sum of it's words! I guess they pay voice actors on the big animations big money for a reason ???!!! On your other excellent points... I will definitely pay attention in future to scale (tiger vs. cat), going for a more uniform style, making sure all aspects of story are getting across even if I have to sacrifice some animation, and most DEFINITELY will be UNCHECKING THE SPATIAL POSITIONING for audio files hahaha lesson painfully learned !!!

Thanks again ddrake