An animator from Australia sent me a nice message via youtube, and I looked at all his animations on his channel TheBoogley. I really enjoyed watching them, and think he has a lovely fluid style and sense of fun and surprise. I was amazed to learn these were all done in Flash with a Wacom tablet.
He says:
I work using a wacom tablet straight into flash. I set the brush tool smoothing down to 35 which makes the line a little scraggily at times but keeps it fairly true to the movement of my hand. A few months ago I bought a wacom cintiq screen tablet, it's increased my speed by at least 10 times!
The Cintiq is the fancy Wacom tablet where you look at the screen as you draw. Now I'm thinking: I WANT ONE! This teenser laptop screen is a challenge for me.
I thought his animations were excellent, and love the look of the youtube channel too. Maybe he'll stop by here. It amazed me that they had an animation CLUB that met once a month and people would do animation just for the meeting.
6 comments:
I love the look of his youtube channel too.
The animation club idea is wonderful... My pal Mary Ann is in a writing group called TIAPOS that meets regularly, and it's the same idea only they bring writing to the meetings. (TIAPOS stands for This Is a Piece of Shit.)
I'm crazy about my regular old Wacom tablet because it allows me to draw and look straight ahead, rather than down. But Lisa H has one of those Cintiq's and loves it. I wonder how using one has increased his speed so much?
Linda, I'm hoping he'll drop in and tell us about the speed increase. With my tiny tablet, the place where the mark is made doesn't exactly match the round circle that shows as the point of pen and the compensating is irritating. A writing club seems much easier than an animation club, because there's just so much more dedicated time required.
Yeah, but what if you did a 10 or 15 second animation each month? (Or just 10 or 15 seconds of a longer one.) I think we should have an animation club.
The round circle and the point of the pen HAVE to match up!!
Wow, cool cartoon!
My favorite animations are ones that catch you off guard- full of surprises! This one does it, a lot of Fleisher cartoons did it, your work does it too.
Thanks for plugging my work Sally, as a fan of your work I'm really get a kick out of this.
The animation club meetings are great, most of the entries are from students and alumni of RMIT university in Melbourne. Sarah Phillips runs the nights and does a great job of keeping it casual. You just email the files to her or turn up half and hour early on the night with a file and she compiles it then and there, then shows them. Then people do the whole voting thing, drink beer and have a giggle. http://theanimationclub.com
Linda, I love the idea of This Is A Piece Of Shit, that's hilarious.
Using the cintiq is a little strange at first because the actual image on the screen is a few millimeters below the surface on which you use the pen. I got used to that pretty quickly though and now it feels just like regular drawing to me. Also if I'm directly above the tablet looking down at it the pen and the circle match up fine for me.
I do prefer the feel of sensitivity more using it in photoshop, and the look I get using the brush tool in Illustrator is smoother and more professional, but I like the instant gratification of drawing directly into flash and testing and improving the animation as I go. Otherwise I have to wait until the end of the day before I can export a "pencil test" to see it moving.
Has anyone tried working with After Effects, I've seen amazing work produced in it but haven't ever used it myself.
Hey there, TheBoogley, thanks for stopping by here! Does that Cintiq get warm in your lap? My HP tablet does.
I've used After Effects since it came out. Only thing is I only use it every couple of years, and like so much software, each new version is a bear to learn.
The version I have is from about two years ago, and they still hadn't ironed out all the Flash issues then, but maybe have now.
There are incredible things that can be done in After Effects if you can just stick with it.
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