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Thanks, Vern. The credit for the story reel (for me, anyway) goes to that character animation tutorial I watched on Lynda. It really made a lot of sense and it also meant that as I went, I could watch it over and over again, watching as more and more of it came together. It also forced me to consider what had gone before and what was going after shots, rather than thinking of shots as stand alones. And the beauty, too, was that my storyboards were very loose and easy to do (I hadn't intended to ever show them to people!) :-) Like my alien language handwriting, they only had to make sense to me.

III. Story Reel I'm not going to really spend a lot of time on this part, since it was basically straight forward. In Premiere, I was able to bring in the three scans of the story boards and position them to show each board at a time. I'd already trimmed the audio and brought it in and just placed the images and adjusted the transitions to match the lines in the song. To make it a little clearer (and since I already had the models of the characters), I posed them into the various poses for the storyboards and did renders that I brought in to replace the hastily sketched ones. A version of the story reel was uploaded to The Wannabe Pirates thread proper here (Post #255). Not only did this give me a sense of how it would look and work, but it gave me the timing I would use for each shot. This was a great resource and basically allowed me to do the editing prior to setting up the first shot. At least, the rough first version of it. Unfortunately, I had a prior commitment for the upcoming Monday that required me to fly home that weekend and not get back until Tuesday evening, so work halted for awhile. I did use the time to watch the story reel several times, trying to formulate how I was going to solve certain problems. IV. Shot 1 For the 2007 Christmas card, I had entered the scene by panning down from the sky, following some Flash animated snow flakes. I had thought to do the same again, but I really didn't want to have to create anymore of the house set than was necessary, and that would require showing a roof and a second floor. I thought a better establishing shot would be to move across the landscape, showing the snow-covered trees and then finding Flemm at the window watching the snow. Many years ago I had started working on an animated Christmas card for the advertising agency I was working at that was a parody of A Charlie Brown Christmas. It began with a left to right pan, so that may have slightly influenced me, too. I was always disappointed that animation was canned. It turned out to be a victim of a power struggle between the owner of the agency and the creative director. I only created one tree model (loosely based on the 2D version I'd drawn for the 2007) version and realized that since the opening titles would run over much of the shot, they wouldn't be the focus of the viewer's attention, I wouldn't really need to vary the model and could just use duplicates. Besides, I liked the uniformity of them. They weren't supposed to be real trees, after all. To create the left to right pan, I decided to have the camera stay in a fixed position and rotate around until it made it into position. From the top, the choreography looked like this: As you can see, I staggered the trees around and used a duplicate of camera 1 to move all the way around through the shot, making sure I'd filled in the gaps. The ground plane was a dense mesh that I could pull up points on so that the ground wouldn't look completely flat in the camera frame. I overestimated how much landscape I would need and found that to get the speed I wanted, I only needed a small section of what I'd done. Once I'd completed setting everything up in the first frame, I moved the duplicate camera to match the end of the shot and used that to pose Flemm. For this shot, I only needed a small part of the house set. I built the house set as a series of separate models for each wall, so that I could assemble it as needed. The snow and titles I added in After Effects. I'd found a tutorial showing how to alter the bubbles effect to look and behave like falling snow. It worked pretty well. The snow does track with the camera, but I was again counting on the viewer's attention being focused on the opening titles until after the camera had stopped panning. In hindsight, I think the biggest thing would have been to have figured out the timing and speed of the camera pan much earlier. I wasted a large amount of time placing trees, adjusting them to fill gaps and raising up sections of the ground and the majority of the area wasn't needed in the final render. Flemm's animation is a little hurky jerky in this shot and I think I had his body moving a bit too much. The light in the window makes sure that he's the center of attention, I didn't need him to move around alot to draw that attention. One thing, I should point out is that I had intended this time to be able to make a DVD of this Christmas card to mail out and wanted it to be widescreen. Researching the matter, I found that standard definition DVD pixel size was 720x480 and the pixel aspect ration was 1.21. So, my cameras in A:M were set to render at that size with that aspect ratio. (That's why they appear scrunched up prior to having the correct aspect ratio applied to them.)

Thanks, guys! Rodney, I'm amazed I was able to do it that quickly, too! Of course, I look it and all I see are the shortcuts. :-) Doing that first one in such a short time gave me unrealistic expectations about how quickly I could do future animations. The 2008 Christmas animation wasn't as long as the 2007 version and I barely finished it in a month! Thanks, Vern. I hope that this look back will have some educational value, as well.

Thanks, Vern! LOL, no global climate political statement... just following the lyrics of the song. :-) Yes, my handwriting has deteriorated to the point of being some alien language, but I was able to figure out what most of it said. I do so little of it now that it's amazing I still even remember. I'm pretty sure I've already forgotten how to write in cursive.

Hopefully this won't be too painful! :-) I'm going to use this thread to dig through all of the remains of the animated Christmas Greeting I did for Christmas '08. My hope is that by doing some self analyzing, I'll be able to learn some more about the process and make the next project (The 12-Chapter Wannabe Pirates Serial) the better for it... or at least not make some of the same mistakes again! I. The Backstory Less than a week away from Christmas in 2007, I came up with the idea of doing a quick animated greeting card with the one character I had completed from The Wannabe Pirates (Captain Errol Flemm) that I could share online with my friends. My memory is that this was mostly born out of guilt because another year had gone by where I had not thought to get Christmas cards to send out to my friends, but had received several from friends and now I felt rotten about it. For Christmas 2006, I had sent an email Christmas card with a drawing I'd done of some elves, so I thought I could one-up it by doing some animation. I'm sure I had seen Gerry working on his company's animated Christmas card, too. It was the Thursday before Christmas (Christmas Day was on the following Tuesday) and I turned to my iPod and started going through Christmas songs that I had, trying to find some inspiration while I toiled at work. Looking over what I had, I thought a Dean Martin song would be appropriate, since Flemm looks a little like Dean Martin and there was a certain frivolity to those songs that would keep this from being serious. I was really looking for something cheesey and hit the jackpot with a song called "A Marshmallow World." :-) Fueled by inspiration and not knowing what I was getting myself into, I was somehow able to complete it around 1 or 2 o'clock Christmas morning. Looking back at it now, it is very primitive looking (this was during a period when I was making the characters shiny) and it leaned heavily on cutting to simple Flash animations to keep from having to do the lipsyncing for every line. It's still online here. I was pretty pleased with it at the time and I sent links out to my friends and they seemed to get a kick out of it and I though to myself that next year I would start much earlier and save myself the sleepless nights. II. Coming Up With the Idea: 11/17/2008 Part of the impetus this time around was having upgraded my Adobe Creative Suite to the Production Premium version, which gave me After Effects, Premiere and Encore for the first time. Because I'd never used them, I immediately dug into video tutorials at Lynda.com and one of them discussed doing character animation in AE and showed a workflow process where storyboards were put into Premiere and then as each shot was completed, it was updated until it was completely animated. I was anxious to give this a try and have a practical reason to play around with AE, so I again went to my iPod. I had used Dean Martin last year, but couldn't find anything as funny as "A Marshmallow World," so I started listening to everything I had. Just hoping something would work. For awhile, I really liked the idea of using "Sleigh Ride" sung by Bing Crosby. I could see the cast in a big sleigh (being pulled by a put-upon Poco Boco!) The song has backup singers, meaning that all of the cast could join in. I still liked the idea of using Dean Martin, though. I just let the music play and "Let it Snow" came on and I just had this image of Flemm singing this while trying to woo Henrietta and failing miserably. Dean Martin, of course, would get the girl, but Flemm wouldn't, and I liked that it became a sort of juxtaposition with the lyrics. He would sing one thing, but something else would happen. The image I remember most came during the line "The fire is slowly dying, and my dear, we're still good-bying" when I pictured Flemm on the doorstep, but Henrietta is already upstairs in bed asleep. :-) That was what sold me. I quickly put together a rough storyboard template and printed it out and sketched out the basics for the entire animation in between jobs at work. These are *very* rough, but there's a lot of stuff that made it all the way through to the end: The highlighted lines indicated that we would see Flemm singing them. I was still looking for ways to not have to animate all of the lyrics.

Cool! Thanks, everybody! That's kind of what I'm thinking, Vern. Getting a "hind sight" look in hopes of improving for the next work. I think I've gotten far enough away from it now. I'll start a new thread and begin at the beginning and work my way through.

Very neat, Kat!

I really covered just about everything I wanted to cover with these tutorials. (I was really just wanting to pass on the few things about modeling in A:M that were gate-openers when I first started learning.) However, I thought for my own purposes, it might be neat to deconstruct the Animated Christmas Greeting I did a few months ago and discuss what I learned and how I solved some of the problems and what I thought succeeded and what didn't. Would anybody (besides me) find that helpful or useful?

Just a quick note to say work is progressing! I'm almost through with the design for the villain and am still formulating the particulars of the story. One of the cool parts of doing the story this way is that I can do an epic story in a very short amount of screen time. In a way, it kind of reminds me of old Silver Age comic book stories. Back in the day, they would do a huge story that would only take up half of the story pages of a comic. You would get multiple big stories in a single issue. Then somebody decided that comic books should be more like soap operas and now they take the same size story and spread it over half a dozen issues. Not sure if I've mentioned it here, but it occurred to me at one point, that with the entire story being told in rhyme, it would make an excellent children's book when all is said and done! Anyway, just posting to say the project is still alive and kicking and there should be some more stuff to see soon!

That's really fantastic, Paul!

Have you tried it with your new computer? Maybe it will be able to play it with sound now. Kinda' need the sound. :-)

Spleen, don't forget the incredible favor done for you by Xtaz here! There is a wealth of information shared in his video tutorials!

Lookin' good, Mark. The hair is nice and thick. I always wondered about the scale of the follicles. Given his tremendous size, wouldn't Kong's hair follicles be enormous, too? Big enough that they wouldn't blow in the wind? :-)

I'm with Robert on this one. It would also be cool if we could have it in a place where we could show what we're working on.

Just my take on it, Mark. Character-wise they are giant carnivorous gorillas, so I wouldn't want them to look like they spend their whole days sitting around eating twigs. It's a similar exaggeration to Flemm's lower body being so much smaller than his upper half. Rodney, I'm a terrible pat rack, so I do tend to hold onto things, but most everything is digital now.

Thanks, guys! Rodney, gorillas are apes, so I don't think it matters that much. We're referring to them as Gorillas, though. As to how they fit into things, the gorillas are part of the larger "world" of the Wannabe Pirates. Writing is difficult, but it will be worth it. Coming up with the first line was really tough. Lots of false starts. It's still very slow going. I've gotten 8 stanzas of the first chapter done. It is starting to get a little easier,though as I become more familiar with it. After a long session of writing today, I was thinking in rhyme and worried that I wouldn't be able to stop. :-) It really is going to be epic by the time I finish it!

Ken has once again made my day! Here's that next character he mentioned: a giant gorilla! I've stuck Flemm in for scale. This is just too cool! Big thanks, Ken! With your help, this story is going to be big-time fun!

Is their "Active" state in the properties window set to "OFF"?

Nothing to show for this status update, but work is moving quickly! I finished the design for another one of the new characters last night and this weekend I plan to do nothing but write! I'm fairly comfortable with the plot I've written for the 12 chapters, but now comes the fun part: writing them up as one long narrative poem! I'll be refreshing myself with "The Hunting of the Snark" to get the rhythm going and hope that everything falls into place. I'm also going to use Snark to figure out how much I can fit into the 1 minute timeline. There's no doubt that this is going to be a *very* quickly-paced story. :-)

That is awesome! Well done!

Depends on when and where, but I'd be up for it.

Rodney, there's no chance I won't keep sharing progress reports here on the forums! Like this post, for example! :-) KenH has graciously offered to up the quality of this project by lending a hand! His first contribution is the modeling for a new character being introduced in this story, Lenny the Laughing Gull! I love this character and Ken really did an amazing job of bringing him into 3D!

Yeah, Kelley! Really cool!

Thanks, homeslice!

Kevin, I used to get crashes when I first started working with A:M, but as I gained more experience working with it, I learned that there's a sort of right way and wrong way to do things. The biggest culprit for me early on was, just clicking in a bunch of places rapidly: going to do one thing, and then realizing I needed to do something else and confusing A:M to the point that it gave up on me. :-) There are still some things that will take A:M down for me no matter what. (If I try to make a New Filter in the PWS using the drop down menu on a Mac, it will go bye-bye everytime.) There's a kind of rhythm to using A:M that you'll pick up the more you use it and then the crashes will pretty much go away. At least, that was my experience.