Happy New Year, I hope everyone had a great Christmas and holiday!

I'm still on my time off from school, and I've been able to do a lot of artwork so far. As for my concurrent senior film, I also intend on using this time to animate more scenes. More to come on that!

I've begun storyboarding the next major Hyper-Breakers cartoon, and I tried to go all-out on the storyboards. I'd like to share a sample of what the boards look like!

Doing this was very much a worthwhile exercise, I think. While I could have made chicken scratch storyboards, putting more detail gives me a clearer picture of what I want to show. I've noticed that if I leave things too ambiguous/unclear, when the time comes to animate I become intimidated and would not want to work on a scene at all. I would be doing more guesswork rather than just having a stronger storyboard to begin with.

Unlike this episode's predecessor, Caffeinated Chaos, I'm aiming for it to be a two-parter instead of a three-parter... for my own sanity lmao. I'm also hoping that the overall story is stronger too, I think I've improved slightly more as a writer since my last go-around with these characters.

Ditto, I can observe this too when I visit his profile

Hmm... A roundabout solution could be converting your video to a JPG or PNG sequence. Flash should read those just fine. There's plenty of software/websites that could convert your video, it's worth a shot.

One thing to note is that your video/image sequence itself should be at the frame-rate you intend to animate on. For example, a 24 fps video for a 24 fps timeline in Flash.

I haven't watched any Gundam yet but I hope to someday. Though in the "big robot" genre... I actually picked up a copy of Robotech a couple days ago as it was on sale, and I plan to give that a watch soon.

Actually, Autosave is the one I really used ha ha! I never used the rest of the suite as they were premium plugins **Although I do not think that is the case nowadays. @SnootAnon made a thread mentioning that the developer had discontinued support for the suite, and provided a free version.

The classic TrickOrScript plugin library has a free Flash 8 compatible autosave plugin, I've used it myself.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.trickorscript.com/download_individually.php

Lmao, the opossum lady gives you her thanks!

I want to throw in the Komika font family by Apostrophic Labs as an alternative, the whole series contains a bunch of styles like Komika Hand, Slick, and Jam. They were made way way back in the 2000s as a royalty free set of lettering fonts, and I think it still holds up today.

https://www.1001fonts.com/komika-font.html

If anyone's on the fence about joining Flash Forward, I'd definitely say to go for it! I participated back in the 2021 jam and I remember being nervous about learning Actionscript. But, it was made better by the tons of flash-making resources and guides people have made over the years here on NG. Looking forward to seeing what this month holds!

I use Tahoma2D as well and how vectors are handled drives me up the wall! I mostly work with raster now, but the way Adobe Flash handles vectors has to be the thing I miss the most from switching.

There's a toggle within Tahoma/Toonz's menu that can help show where the problem areas are in the art; check out this section from the official documentation:

https://opentoonz.readthedocs.io/en/latest/painting_animation_levels.html

I remember using Fill Check a handful of times, it shows you the areas in your art that can be filled by temporarily auto-coloring it in gray. Gap Check sounds like it can help too, but I've no experience using it.

When using vectors in this program there have been many times where I'm absolutely sure I've left no gaps, but I've still not been able to fill my artwork, leaving me stumped each time...

Hello hello! It's been a while since I last updated this thread. Since the beginning of the semester, I've begun the animation stage for my senior thesis film. It's about a cartoon rat who wakes up late for work. Heres a couple bits of WIP stuff from it:

Here's one of the main rat character, Reese.

And here's one of a meter maid.

To help you get started, it is a great idea to check out The Animator's Survival Kit by the late Richard Williams. It gets recommended ad nauseam, but it builds a solid foundation. Though it mainly deals with character animation, it's theory and lessons can also be applied to other forms of animation like motion graphics, if that happens to be what you're pursuing.

https://www.amazon.com/Animators-Survival-Kit-Richard-Williams/dp/0571202284

I'll admit, I haven't read Survival Kit cover to cover because I'm such a poor reader. I just end up mindlessly watching animations that I think are cool over and over, while sometimes taking mental notes.

I also watched Alan Becker's video on the 12 principles of animation when I was just starting out, he explains them pretty well!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDqjIdI4bF4

This is a great habit to get into! Any effort towards keeping things organized, or pre planning work-to-be-done through scripts and outlines, can really help streamline the process.

Ha ha! I feel this too! I've caught myself making things too saturated many times.

Audio mixing is something I'm starting to get into as well as result of doing animation, it can be really fun to make new sounds by layering stuff together. I have a couple links on this bookmarked, they may be of some help to you too:

A blog post by Shutterstock's sound-site on volume levels.

https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/how-to-set-audio-levels-for-video/

A page by sound designer Andrew Scott with a list of freebie sound packs

https://www.andrewvscott.com/Building-A-Large-SFX-Library-for-Free

Man, it sucks to hear this news. My condolences to his family as well as those close to him.

Johnathan was a very talented artist. Just last month I read his forum thread on his Dungeons & Dragons animations, he was really good at what he did. Like many, I remember him as well from visiting the chat page.

Rest easy, Johnathan.

Though I'm not sure if this would be a better way, another approach could be making the white platforms appear as if they're being swallowed by the ground. For example, as the platforms retract into the ground, the grass encroaches frame by frame over the them until it is all green.

Welcome to the animation forum! I always enjoy when these types of threads pop up. It was really interesting reading up on how you approached the 2D-3D hybrid scene, and the clever way you got around the cropping trouble in post-production.

Woah this is a great find, thanks for sharing this! Coincidentally, I just happened to get Rocko's Modern Life on DVD, so seeing this e-book available too is a nice surprise.

Very excited for when all these changes go live! The Playlist system update with series pages is a stand out to me, I'm hyped for that!

ITS DONE! The final part to cap off this trilogy...

As is tradition in this thread, I have some screencaps.

I'll probably write a more in-depth reflection later, but I'm gonna head to bed and get some rest. Thanks so much to all you guys on the forum who stumbled across my thread!

The animation for all the scenes in Caffeinated Chaos' final part are done... Now all that's left are background painting and special effects/compositing. These two stages may take some time themselves but it feels great that all of the heavy animation work is done.

Watching my rough cut over and over throughout working on this, I can no longer tell if the story is melting before my eyes or if it resembles something comprehensible. Maybe that's the charm of it ehhh......?

So even with Background and Effects still needing to be worked on, I still consider this the final stretch for this animation, and I have one last set of clips to share, from various points in the runtime.

https://www.animatorisland.com/51-great-animation-exercises-to-master/

This is a list of 51 animation exercises, starting with the most basic like a bouncing ball, and by the end are of basic character animation. I hope this link is of some use as I have shared it before on another thread, though I haven't personally worked through the entire list.

You're correct, 1980x1080 is the gold standard for most online content these days. My layman's understanding is that 720p is considered a baseline HD, and 1080p is considered "Full" HD; I believe these are based off of digital television standards that were defined at the dawn of high-definition digital video.

Now for feature films, it seems to be just a little different... Wikipedia leads me to believe that feature productions conform to the DCI stardard. Whereas 1920x1080 is the most common HD resolution, the DCI 2K standard defines a resolution of 2048x1080, so a picture that's a smidge more wide.

I assume that at least in traditional studio environments, it's a mix of both. This comes down to the division between duties within a studio/team. A key animator would usually* not have to care about what color the character is, because that's the job of the colorist.

Have a look at these images of Goku from Dragon Ball Z:

The top image is a model sheet that would have been referenced by the key animators. It's a bare bones guide showing how the character looks. I believe in Japan, many of the animators do their work with pencil and paper up to this day. When those animators are done, their work is scanned into computers to be colored. So because those animators are of a separate position from the studio colorist, they would not need a colored reference sheet.

The bottom image is the reference a colorist would use. It is essentially an altered animator's model sheet with diagrams of which colors go where, as that is the information most important to the colorist. I've never worked in a studio before, so please take what I've said with a grain of salt.

*I put an asterisk by "usually" because I have seen scans of rough animation where the key animator makes some kind of note on his/her drawing that relates to color. This could have to do with special FX they have created, or just to clear up any potential confusion the colorist might have when they work on the animator's drawing.

This one's pretty cool! The CGI, Newgrounds logo, and black background reminds me a lot of those 90s-era Nickelodeon bumpers.

Well, since I finished the last of the storyboards my project needed last week, I had no choice but to bite the bullet and begin animating these difficult action scenes.

In this scene, the cat is dodging a series of punches and a kick.

Here's a slowed down version:

And here's my rough animation (Just the cat character):

*I animated the plastic bag separately, and the punches afterwards.

I'm really really happy with how this turned out! I ended up animating straight-ahead and it seems like it was the way to go for a frenetic scene like this.

I AIN'T DEAD!

Since my time off from school began a few weeks ago, I've been trying to grind out the rest of Caffeinated Chaos. Last time I shared an early animatic of an action sequence that's supposed to appear midway. I'm happy to say that I finished the storyboard/animatic of the whole fight scene! Here's two of my favorite parts:

So the above isn't really the rough animation. But, I wanted these animatics to have enough specificity so there's not too much more planning I have to do when I actually sit down and tackle these scenes. On a side note: even though I'm animating the final footage in Opentoonz, Flash was by far the best tool for quickly hammering out this animatic.

I also use impact frames too much, but man are they fun to draw:

So as it stands, over half of the animation for the whole cartoon is done. Every scene is now storyboarded out, no blank spots.

It's awesome seeing the Flash Forward Jams becoming regular fixture of the site's events! Congratulations to all the winners and participants, part of this site's heritage is preserved through your efforts.

Thanks so much for the feedback, you bring up some good points! Your smear frame comment in particular I think is pertinent. While I do like distorting the drawings for the sake of exaggeration, I need to animate more "full" actions without using smears as a crutch.

Best of luck to those making the deadline tonight!

Before I begin a storyboard, I write up an outline document. It would include a very basic synopsis of the story, along with any other important events or gags that will transpire in the animation. Once that document is finalized I would begin storyboarding based on that, making any further changes to the story within the storyboard.