Last week I was visited by a family member, Jordache, who is interested in animation. I’d done a bit of animation with THSH earlier in the year, so I thought I’d try and use similar techniques to produce another animation.
As with any animation the first step was to decide what it was all going to be about. I let Jordache take the lead on this one. He decided to make an animation based on the popular Legend of Zelda game series by Nintendo. After the ideas and storyboard were completed we then had to get all of the elements needed to make this animation. This is where I wanted to challenge him. I asked him to use GIMP and a Wacom tablet to draw out the star of the animation, Link. An outline sketch was found on the Internet and he added the colour. The results are shown below.
It was a great learning process for him and myself. There are many differences between GIMP and Photoshop but for this task we both picked up the basics very quickly. The finished picture took about three hours to complete.
The next setp was to draw the background. For this I wanted to expand his drawing and painting capabilities. We used a mixture of acrylic paint and crayons to create the background.
Finally, with all elements completed we had to film it. One of the problems we encountered was how to keep the camera still whilst filming. Link had to be shown riding across the background and this would prove hard to do whilst keeping the camera still, especially in such a small space. He decided on the different approach of moving the background instead.
To film it we used SMA (newer version available at Brickfilms.com), which is open source but limited in its features. For example, you can’t add music within the program. Editing tools are very limited as well. However, for this animation everything worked as we needed it!
Due to time restrictions we weren’t able to go through adding sound to the movie, so I took on this task. For this I used Audacity. I used audio from the Zelda game available from the Zelda Reorchestrated website. Editing was a very simple process of decding what part of the audio I wanted to use and then where I wanted it to fade in and out.
Adding fading in and out to the movie itself proved a little problematic using open source software. VirtualDub is a very popular simple video editing program but it lacks the ability to add fades. A quick search on Google showed a few plugins available, including one which would be complex to use (but no doubt powerful). I soon stumbled upon FadeFX that luckily has a gui to add fades. One of its limitations is that it can’t fade out sound as well. For this task it wasn’t a problem as I already used Audacity to found out the soundtrack.
With everything now in place I put it all together!
The resolution could’ve been a bit higher and we both have a bit to learn about studio lighting, but we the equipment we had we produced something we’re happy with! Learning how to use the software was quite easy to do for both of us but it would be good if some simple tasks were a bit more simple to do!
