Construction
There are several steps to the production of this piece, the intention is to
make each of the scenes in the original cartoon into a shot, each of the
characters will be separated out and individually animated before adding back
into the scene. This is very similar to the old fashioned cell animation.
The following steps will be done
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Scanning : Getting the image digitised and cleaning up the "drop-outs" and
other anomalies.
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Separation : Splitting each of the parts of the image, e.g. background,
characters, speech bubble.
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Test Animation : This will prove that the technique will work in practice. A
simple shot will be completed all the way to the production stage.
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Sound Recording : Each of the voices will be recorded and no doubt re-recorded,
until I am happy with the results.
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Modelling, Character animation and lip sync : One of the hardest stages, the
limbs of the characters will be animated and their mouths will be synced to the
sound
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Intro sequence and credits : It's tempting to do this first but I hope to leave
it till later in the project.
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Colouring : I am not sure about this but although I intend to keep the
characters black and white the backdrop may be coloured.
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Composition : The backdrop, characters and speech bubbles will all be put into
each of the scenes and the final film will be produced.
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Screening : A few select people will be chosen to check for mistakes and
suggest improvements
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Final cut and release : The release will be posted up on the net and a few
search engines will be informed of it's availability, all of my friends and
relatives will say "What have you been wasting your spare time on now!" then I
hope they will be very impressed.
The Technology
A regular colour scanner was used with a resolution of 600DPI; once cleaned up
the images are shrunk back down to a manageable size.
Paintshop Pro 6 and 7 is used in the preparation of the images
Ray Dream 3D will be used for the animation, hopefully allowing fairly painless
tracking shots to be done. This has been updated to Carrara Studio.
Magpie has been selected to do most of the difficult work with the lip syncing.