I recently finished doing a series of animation workshops. For this we were using Macs and lots of preinstalled software. As an experiment we decided to try out Pencil for doing digital drawings. Here’s what the website has to say about it:
Pencil is an animation/drawing software for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. It lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon) using both bitmap and vector graphics. Pencil is free and open source.
I’d stumbled across Pencil earlier in the year when I was trying to find other similar software. What I like about Pencil is a drawing tool is that everything you create is in vectors and the interface is simple and easy to use. The children using the software picked it up quite quickly without much assistance. Another user tried using it in the classroom with great success.
On the other hand Pencil does have its shortcomings. There’s no file format so you have to open files via the program’s interface. It is beta software so there’s always a few bugs to iron out. I think the biggest hurdle to overcome is .jpg export. At the moment I’m getting a few errors and instead have to export to .png.
If you’re looking for a free/open source solution for doing simple animations you could definitely give Pencil a try. If you’re after something just to do drawings try Inkscape instead.
Yesterday I was at the BVSC talking to several representatives/employees from non-profit organisations about how social media can benefit their company. This was part of Blog Action Day where the theme was Poverty.
I arrived slightly late at the venue but you could clearly see that everyone was already deeply engaged in conversations with the social media expert.
Before I even had a chance to boot up my laptop there was already a table of people wanting advice. I don’t pretend to call myself an expert in social media, just a person who uses it often for leisure and work. The tools are very easy to use and they do have their benefits; They connect you with friends, people who are in the same line of work or share similar interests and help spread word of your cause. This is how I feel social media can help a non-profit organisation, by connecting you with people and other organisations that support your cause.
By writing often, including links to relevant websites, responding to comments from others and generally providing useful information you’ll soon find yourself part of a national or even global network!
It’ll still be very interesting to see how utilising social media affects these organisations and their causes, but one thing it may certainly do is at least raise awareness!
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!
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I’d stumbled across Pencil earlier in the year when I was trying to find other similar software. What I like about Pencil is a drawing tool is that everything you create is in vectors and the interface is simple and easy to use. The children using the software picked it up quite quickly without much assistance. Another user tried using it in the classroom with great success.
