Shaolin Bishop and the Bouncing Balls of Destiny

Shaolin Bishop and the Bouncing Balls of Destiny

• part I 
• this post

My new video is finished (you can watch it here). This one was mostly about drawing, I didn´t do much computer stuff. I just drew the frames, scanned them, edited the pictures to the right size (1280x720) and played them. I was drawing chronologically, and I didn´t have a plan for timing. I think it´s visible in the video, because it may be a little bit slow. So, I will give more time to planning next time.

The video consists of 29 pictures and each one is shown for 0.06 seconds, which may be a strange number. It´s approximately 18 frames per second. I have tried different timing (12 fps and 24 fps) but this one looked most natural.

I´m not sure why, but when I tested the video by taking pictures of the raw frames (only pencil and all messy, no details) it looked better than now, when I inked it, and added the details. First think I do is drawing all the frames with a pencil (a very soft 6B, next time I plan to try 8B) and then inking it with a black pencil, to make it more visible after scanning. And I think that´s it, most of the description of what I did and how I did it is in the part I post.

Now I can go prepare the next Shaolin Bishop video where I will try another "tip to learn animation".

Shaolin Bishop and the Bouncing Balls of Destiny

After making a few animated videos (you can see them on my Youtube channel), I´ve decided it would be nice to do a few of those known tips that should help me learn animation a little. Some of these tips are on 11 second club, some are on Animator Island and I am sure there are hundreds of websites where you will find more. All these lists of things have common start: the bouncing ball. Bouncing ball is a great thing, I agree, the shape of a ball is simple and it´s easy to keep looking the same on all frames. But, I don´t know, bouncing ball seems a little boring to me, because I want to draw something interesting, not just circles.

I will do the bouncing ball, why not. But maybe if I add a little something, it´ll be more interesting to draw. Instead of one ball, there will be two balls. And also a cartoony character I would like to call Shaolin Bishop. It may sound like random madness. That´s because it is random madness.

The picture below shows the plan (it´s very rough, but just enough). The Bishop is in the middle and on the sides, there are poles (sticks, or anything you imagine) with balls on them. The bishop will jump. When he is in the air, he will kick his legs, hit the balls, the balls will fall and, finally, bounce. So, technically, it´s a bouncing ball excersise. In reality, it´s more.

I should plan the whole thing, like the timing and then draw exactly the right amount of frames, but I think I will try to be more relaxed about this video. I´ll just draw the frames one by one and see where it leads.

I quite like the idea of this character, the Bishop. Which is why I think I might stick to him for a little longer and use him in more videos. Firstly, his clothes are quite complicated, which makes the movement interesting. He can also have that funny staff bishops have, which means endless possibilities. Below is a slightly better sketch of what the Bishop might look like.  In blue colour, to add some diversity into this blog post.

Now to the technical stuff. First thing I did was drawing the whole thing into my small notebook (or sketchbook or whatever it´s called). On the picture below, you can see the first plan of what I wanted to draw. It starts with the bishop holding a staff, throwing it in the air, then he jumps and kicks the two balls and then the staff falls back to his hand. From what I´ve written above, it´s clear that I have decided not to do the staff bits, the beginning and the end. The reason is, that it would make it twice as hard and twice as long to draw, and this is a bouncing ball excersise. He can throw things in another video.

 After that, I have drawn 10 pictures of the bishop jumping to test if it looks ok (especially the hat, I was a little worried about the hat) and you can see the result below. I think it works fine, just the timing is (probably) wrong, it seems too slow. But, as I wrote above, I am not planning timing, so it´s not important now.

The final video and some more information about it will be in a next post.

Brody´s Ghost video - Final part

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

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

Finally, everything´s done, drawn, scanned, processed and the video is finished. You can watch it here.

So, I suppose it´s time for a short summary of it all. It would be great to start by writing how long did it take me to make the video. But if I said something like 3 weeks, it would be misleading, because I worked on it only in my free time, not every day. Also, I don´t remember when I started.

But I can tell how many pictures I drew.
Head turn of the main ghost, Kagemura, is drawn on 11 pictures, for the zoom of Kagemura, I drew 1 picture (because I rendered it in computer), Chi has walked into the scene on 11 frames, the hand with snapping fingers took me 24 frames to draw, Kyo jumping into the screen was drawn on 18 frames, Soku on 7, Gi on 19 and Ran on 11. If you add these numbers, you get, that I drew 102 pictures of the Brody´s ghost characters. All of the 102 frames are together on a pictures below.

I should also mention the music and sound in the video. The music is quite simple, which is caused by the fact that I have made it myself in Garageband on iPad. And the sound of snapping fingers is a sound I recorded. That´s it really, no magic was involved.

And the absolutely last thing I will mention is this. As I have written in the Introduction (part 0) post, all the characters in the video are from comic book series Brody´s Ghost by Mark Crilley. I only drew them all in a different positions and on all the frames.

Brody´s Ghost video - part IV

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

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

There are three more characters that will be entering the video at this point. And I plan to deal with all of them in this post.

First one is called Ran and my plan for him is to jump in the scene from above and turn during the falling. To make it a little more interesting. I mean make the drawing interesting, not necessarily the video.

Here is the picture of my plan, the part previous to the frame one will be rendered by computer as vertical fall with no change in shape. Just like before, for example with Kyo in part III.

This time, I have drawn the action on 10 frames, which turned out to look fine, so I think I´ll keep it that way.

The next character is called Chi and he is supposed to be known for his intelligence. Intelligent people don´t rush when it´s not necessary, so he will simply walk into the scene from the right side. I´ve read somewhere that normal walk is usually 2 steps per second, so I used that information and it worked. And it´s not exciting enough to be shown here I think.

The last character is a little more interesting. Its name is Gi and it looks like a ball. So I´ve decided it will arrive by jumping to the scene from behind one of the characters that are already there, bounce a little and then settle down. The picture below shows what I mean.

This one was fun to draw, I´ve started by drawing him as a ball, that bounces (I keep reading everywhere that bouncing ball is essential for people who start with animation, so here we go, I finally got to it). When I was satisfied with the movement of the ball, I added the parts that make this character look as it should.

Brody´s Ghost video - part III

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

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

It´s time to add some other characters into the video. The first one is called Soku and he is supposed to be quick. So I think it´s logical for him to arrive first and very fast. And that means not too many frames. The plan is for Soku to simply fall (jump into the scene) from above, as indicated on the picture below.

The samurai ghost Kagemura will not move at all in the rest of the video, so it´s enough to copy him to every frame as a foreground. In this case, I wanted the ghost Soku to arrive really quickly, which means I only drew 7 frames and his pose doesn´t change much during the fall (which is quite unrealistic, but the movement is too quick, nobody would notice anyway). There´s not so much to tell about this one, because it is quite a dull linear movement.

The second character was much more interesting. It´s a huge one called Kyo. Again, he will jump into the scene, but this time, it´ll be a little different. This character will end standing on all four limbs (just like a gorilla would). The fall will be a little more complicated. I think it might look natural and good, if Kyo is landing on the ground with his arms up (drags the arms behind in a way). So, the legs hit the ground first and then the arms follow and land a little later.

As you can see, the first picture I drew already has legs of Kyo on the screen. The previoous part (falling to the position of the first frame above) will be rendered on computer, because I didn´t want to waste paper on that.

I´ve drawn 17 frames (the top one on picture above being frame number one, the bottom one was number 17), only to find out, that the timing was wrong. If I play all the 17 frames, the fall is too slow. It doesn´t work because this character is supposed to be heavy (well, he´s still a ghost, but he should act as if he was heavy, it looks more natural). The fall that is too slow is on the video below. It´s the 17 frames played at 25 frames per second speed (every drawing is shown for 0.04 seconds, except for the last one).

It´s quite easy to solve such a problem. I just won´t use all the frames I´ve drawn (which is a shame, but it needs to be done). So, I´ve eliminated six of them and you can see the result of the same scene done only in 11 frames below. The frame speed is the same.

Brody´s Ghost video - part II

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

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

Second part of my new video is going to be zooming out from the ghost Kagemura and then him rasing left hand, snapping fingers and putting his hand down again. I´ve decided not to get distracted by things like whether a ghost can snap his fingers, lets just assume he can.

The zooming part was quite a hard one. The problem is this. As you can see in the "part I" blog post on the pictures, I was drawing the character big (close to us). Which means I don´t have him drawn full, just the part above waist. Which means I can´t simply take this picture and make it smaller and smaller (rendering the frames on computer). I need a new drawing of Kagemura. The start and final picture of this zoom scene is on the picture below.

There are two ways of doing this. I can either draw the full character (as on the "end picture") in the size of the "start picture" and then make it smaller and smaller until he gets to the size of the "end picture". This is the good way, drawing something big and then showing it small can´t hurt.

Second way is, to use the "end picture", zoom in to make it look like the "start picture" and then render the frames while it´s getting to its original size. This is the bad way, because if you have a picture and zoom in, it looks terrible.

But I have decided for the second (worse) way in the end. The reason is, that the first would be much more complicated. I draw all the frames on A4 papers horizontally and I know how to edit the frame after scanning it to make everything work together. But if I wanted to draw the ghost in the "start picture" size, I would have to make it on vertical A4 paper and that would bring a lot of confusion with scaling.

After some experiments, I´ve decided the zoom to take 2 seconds, which means I have rendered 48 frames in the computer for it.

The next part is the snapping fingers. In this part, only the left hand of Kagemura will be moving. And because I am lazy, I´ve decided to draw only the hand and add the body later to every frame. I have drawn 24 frames of the hand, which could seem like a 1 second of video, but it´s a slow movement, so I´ll play most of the frames twice and some will be shown even longer (for example the frame just before the fingers snap and the one just after). The video below shows what I mean (it´s not a final version, the timing there still looks a little weird to me). 

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.