Brody´s Ghost video - part I

Here are the links for the other posts in this Brody´s Ghost video series:

• Introduction (part 0)
• this post
• part II
• part III
• part IV
• Final part

In the last post, I have written about my plans for a new video. The first part is the ghost Kagemura arriving to the center of the screen and turning his head to the camera.

I have started with the part where he turns his head, because that is the harder one. It involves changes of shapes which means I need to draw all frames by hand. The action of turning head is a slow one so I think it´s not necessary to aim for 24 frames per second. 12 frames, where each will be played twice could do the trick.

I started by drawing the first pose (profile) and then 11 more, each time turning his head slightly. The goal (the first picture and last picture) is shown below.

I should also point out for those people who have read Brody´s Ghost comics or seen this character somewhere, that my version is not 100% accurate and I don´t even want it to be. I´ve simplified some parts, because the characters must look the same (or at least very similar) in each frame and that´s hard enough even without all the proper details flying everywhere.

To the method of drawing I use is very primitive and I have mentioned it a little in one of my previous posts. It´s necessary to make the blank transparent paper (new frame) be exactly on top of the previous frame and make it not move. My solution for this is on the picture below and it works just fine.
 Another quite important fact is, that the A4 paper has a wrong size. The Youtube format is 16:9 and A4 is different. Which is why I also have a blank white paper with a 25 cm x 14 cm big rectangle in the middle, which approximately represents the frame. And I put this paper under the transparent papers so it´s visible. It would be a solution to draw or print this rectangle on each transparent paper. But I don´t like to waste my time doing things I don´t need, it´s easier to use one of the features of transparent paper - transparency.

Below is the picture of all 12 pictures/frames I have drawn for this particular scene (part I) of the video. Just to show that I am not cheating if anybody suspected me.

And the result can be seen in a video below. I played every frame twice, plus the first one and last one. These are shown for a little longer. By every frame twice, I mean every frame is shown for 0.08 second. Which means that technically, I am drawing at 24 frames per second, but I play the frames at 25 frames per second. And when I am playing every frame twice, it means I am playing them in a spee 12.5 fps. Which doesn´t really matter and it makes no change, I only wanted to mention it.

So, that would be for turning the head.
At the arriving to the screen part, I only took the first frame (profile one), deleted the background (which I described here on another example) and then I made program called Synfig render the frames by moving Kagemura a few pixels each time. Which is 109 frames - 4.5 seconds.

Brody´s ghost video

In the last post, I was writing about my rain video, which was quite a technical thing to do, drawing wasn´t involved so much. And I think it´ll be nice to draw a little more this time. I´m too lazy to create a proper character of my own for the new video. Problem is that (obviously) in my few-second-long videos, I can´t develop epic stories. So I´ve decided to do a short video with characters of someone else.

I like videos of Mark Crilley on Youtube, mostly about drawing manga, or drawing in general. And I have bought some of his comic books, called Brody´s Ghost, which I like. So, I´ve decided to try make a short animated video with some characters from Brody´s Ghost. These days, I read everywhere about copyright and some punishments and courts and laws and people going to prison, which makes me slightly nervous about this whole thing. By doing short animated video with characters from Brody´s Ghost, I will probably break copyright laws, Geneva Conventions and Prime Directive from Star Trek. But I think I´ll risk it anyway.

And now to the video itself. In the Brody´s Ghost comic books, there is a samurai ghost called Kagemura, who has five companions, other ghosts. My idea is, that the samurai ghost will be floating from the left to the middle of the screen, where he will stop. Then he will turn his head and look into the camera. The camera will zoom out a little and he will snap his fingers to call the other five ghosts who will jump and arrive to the scene. In a fight preparation kind of way.

They will arrive one by one, because I don´t want it to be chaotic and I want the video to be longer. That´s it. I think I will spend less time cleaning the whole thing in computer, because that´s not the point here. And it doesn´t help much either. Which means there will be no colours or black and white or anything like that.

I like to start in the beginning, which is the reason why I am starting with drawing the samurai ghost turning his head to look at us. This is the first thing, desite the fact that he has to arrive from the left first. I have decided that arriving from the left is not an exciting action movement so it´ll be good enough to make my laptop render the frames. I it is enough to take the character and move him from left to the center, there will be no change of shapes. And when there is no change of shapes, I don´t see a reason to draw it. That´s boring.

On the video below is my usual ugly (or maybe I should call it rough) first try of seeing what I want to do and deciding about the timing. It´s a series of a few main drawings that tell what is happening. The drawings in between, that I´ll add later, will be there just to "do the movement" and help getting from A to B.

And here are the links for the following posts for this video:

• part I
• part II
• part III
• part IV
• Final part

A Rain Video

After an unusually short amount of time, I´ve put a new video out there. As promised in the last post, it´s just a rain test with a few things moving.

This time, I didn´t draw much, I only drew the background city, which consists of 8 layers. This may sound like a lot, but in fact, I drew two pictures and made the layers in computer. On the picture below are the layers as I made them. Number 1 is the top layer, layer 2 is below that, etc. and layer 8 is at the bottom, so the most of it is behind something. I originally wanted more moving things in the video, but then decided not to do them all. That´s the reason why I have divided the background into more layers than necessary. The green colour indicates the parts of the picture that are deleted, 100% transparent. The layer one only consists of the bridge, for example.

The next thing I did was insert a few images in between certain two layer. Like an image of a train in between layer 1 and layer 2, did some settings in Synfig, the rain above layer 1 etc. Then I blurred everything. Because it looks much better when everything (including the rain) is a little blurry.

The blinking signs (like the "casino" sign on the building in the middle) were very easy. I have done that by switching between two frames. One is empty, fully transparent, and the other one has only the sign "casino" in black colour at the right position. By switching between these two, it (hopefully) looks like blinking sign.

In the end, I let the Synfig program render all the frames. This little short video of mine consists of 614 pictures. Which would be insane to do manually. Insane and unnecessary. So, there you go, this video was done mainly on computer, which is the reason why is every movement linear and not very interesting.

The Rain Experiment

My last video is finished and it would be nice to start doing something new. Because I am not full of ideas this time, I´ve decided to do a rain test. Which is an attempt to create an animated rain. I´ll do some background city and there will be probably moving objects (apart from the rain, the rain itself will be moving of course). But nothing complicated. Because it´s about the rain.

It´s obvious that doing all individual drops of water and making them fall down is a stupid idea. It should be enough to make loads of short lines on a paper (all in the same direction) and then move the camera up on the paper. That could do the trick.

As always, I wouldn´t write about it if I didn´t have something done. Below is a picture of what I have drawn, if the word "drawn" can be used here, it´s just lines and I used a ruler, so it probably won´t be shown in Louvre any time soon.

I think if you look at the picture and all the lines and try to imagine them moving, it looks a little like rain. Next thing I´ve done was cutting the frames out of this. A frame is 16:9 size and the picture above is vertical, approximately 3 frames high. But I didn´t just cut it into three parts, that wouldn´t (probably) look good. I have started on the bottom end and made one frame. The next frame was 50 pixels above. The next one was 50 pixelse above, etc. This gave me 24 frames (one second of video, that´s a nice coincidence). But when I played it at 24 frames per second, the rain seemed too slow and not random enough. So I played all the odd-numbered frames first, then the even-numbered and then cycle it. And the result is below. Not bad, I think.

It´s very light, I don´t know if there is anything visible by the human eye on the picture and the video. But I hope there is. And I think I should get back to work on that city background.

New Video

I have finally finished my last video. You can watch it here.
The process of making this new one started here. So, I´ve decided to write some statistics about it in case someone was interested.

The video has 8.64 seconds in total. The final version on Youtube is longer because I added the intro and the end titles (neither of which was really necessary, I suppose :D ). Anyway, 8.64 seconds. It took me about three weeks of not really intensive work and (this is not a surprise) the most boring part was the cleaning, colouring  and similar stuff on computer. I enjoy the drawing, these technical things are not so interesting for me.

Back to the statistics. The whole thing is on 25 frames per second, because of Windows movie maker that I use to transform the images into a video. You have to decide about the time for which each frame will be shown, not how many will there be in a second. And 1/24 is not a nice number. But 1/25=0.04 is, therefore 25 fps. Some parts of the video (short ones) have the flying bird frames shown on 12.5 fps, half the usual. These are parts where the action is slow (for example when the bird is gliding from left to right). I think it still looks good enough, even though there are not enough frames.

I have drawn 110 images of the bird in different stages, scanned it to computer, deleted the white backgrounds, and coloured the bird (really annoying). Then three pictures of the buildings (which can also be called three layers of background, I suppose). You can see them here or, obviously, in the video. I drew and inked these by hand and then coloured them in a computer. For the lowest layer of background, I have used watercolours and tempera colours. I wrote about these backgrounds in a previous post.

If you are into finance stuff, the transparent paper (only for drawing the bird) I used here cost me approximately 6.6 EUR = 8.6 USD = 5.6 GBP, pick your favourite currency. It was all drawn on an A4 size paper, with a 16:9 rectangle (the screen).

That´s all I had to write today, thanks for watching the video (if you did) and thanks for reading this post (if you did).

Backgrounds Again

In my last post, I was writing about the buildings in the background. The idea here is, that there is blank space between the buildings. And obviously, there needs to be something like a distant background to fill the gap.

The first idea I had was quite obvious. There should be the rest of the city in the distant background. Then I thought about it. It would be quite hard to paint, and it wouldn´t make much sense. It would create an impression that there are the buildings passing by, then there is some strange large gap and then there is a distant rest of the city.

The second idea I had was a forest. It doesn´t make much sense either, but maybe it could have been some kind of park in the city. And there would be a contrast city vs. forest, which I liked. And I painted the forest background.

I´ve never painted a forest before, so I just followed the instructions from a video by Mark Crilley. My forest doesn´t look perfect on this picture, but it would definitely be enough for a background in a short video. The problem is, it doesn´t look good when used as a background for the animation I have, so I won´t use this one.

The last idea was to make it just open sky. It´s not original, exciting, shocking or funny, just a sky. So I painted a sky. I´ve tried it with the animation I have so far (the buildings with the bird) and it looks ok, so I guess I´ll use this.

And, surprisingly, I think it looks better as a picture alone than the forest did. And it took about half the time of painting the forest. I guess sometimes it takes time to get what you want. And I think that´s enough for today.

Background

As I´ve written in my last post, I am trying to do some passing background buildings. This update is only here to show how these will look. If you click on the pictures, you´ll see them in a more finished state.

I think there  is no need to add more detail, because it will be moving. Nobody will notice if the windows are not perfectly shaped or something like that. At least I hope nobody will.

I´m also thinking of adding colours, because like this, it might be a little confusing when the three pictures are combined into one. I have also drawn a few frames of the bird, because the flying sequence was too short.

Now, I can make some risky estimations based on the stuff I have processed in the computer to a more final stage. I think the final video will have around 8 seconds. That sounds very short, but just to put it in context, in the beginning, I was planning for 3 seconds, so there will be almost 200% more stuff :D. And I think it should be finished in a week.

Moving Background

As I wrote last time, in my new video, I will need flying through a city. That involves some buildings movement, unfortunately. I´ve never done this before, but my idea how to do it is quite simple. I´ll just have two buildings on the sides and nothing in middle. And I will make this picture bigger and bigger, so that the buildings will appear closer and closer and they disappear eventually.

I did a little test to see how it might work.

I think it looks good enough. I´ll daw better buildings (obviously it won´t be just boxes with lines). Then it might look really good. I think.

I´ve also had some progress with drawing the animated bird. I´ve drawn 60 frames (which is a big number by my standards), that you can see below. Again, not bad at all, I think I´ll keep it that way.

Now, I´d like to draw the background buildings (and see if my idea works), then clean the 60 frames of the bird, so that I can combine it with the background (in a way I wrote about earlier) and finally the background that will be visible in between the passing buildings. Still a long way to go.