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.

Let´s try again

My second video is done and finished and out there. So it´s time to start with another one. I think this time I might do something shorter, much simpler, but more detailed (better drawn). My first idea was a person playing a piano, but that didn´t interest me so much so I decided for something that might be a little more challenging and involves some background action (not much, just some).

The idea is a flying bird. The "camera" will be a little behind the bird, following it as it flies through a city. Could be good, if I manage to draw it properly.

I have started by watching a few videos of flying birds on YouTube (which I normally don´t do because I don´t care about birds much) to see how the bloody animals move. And after that, I´ve quickly drawn a few pictures to see if it works and to decide about the timing. The result is below.

Yes, it´s ugly and barely visible, but that was the point really. Not to spend too much time on this, it´s just a part of planning. From my last video, I have some experience with results of bad planning. And I want to avoid it this time. I think it doesn´t look bad as it is, it´s on 5 frames per second speed, which means that if I take the pictures (draw them better of course) and then put 3 frames between each two, it might work. I´ll probably make the flight longer later, but for now, this is enough to start with.

I have also heard, that if you draw frames continuously one after one, the action is smoother than if you do a few key drawings and then put another drawings in between them. So I think I´ll try that, I have nothing to lose.

Anyway, not a bad start, I´ll see if it works.

#9 The New Video

This will be a shorter one. I have finally uploaded the new video. And you can watch it here. Come on, you know you want to.

I am not so completely happy it, I think I may have aimed too high with this. It was a little complicated (as you can see in previous posts) and I it doesn´t look as smooth as I would want. But, there are some bits of the video I really like. After all, this is my second video, and I think there is quite a big progress from the last one. And I enjoyed all the drawing, and that´s the point.

So, that would be enough for this post, I have already starting drawing the next video, and it´ll be simpler, and hopefully more realistic. And maybe even better than this one, we´ll see.

#8 Combining pictures

Imagine you have two pictures and want to make them into one proper picture. You have drawn two layers of one picture using pencil, got both to computer and now you need to put the layers on top of each other so that it all works as intended. On the picture below is an example of what I mean, I have a picture of a hand holding a pencil (top layer) and a drawn knight (bottom layer) and I want the image that combines both.

It took me some googling and experimenting to find out that what I need is to let the picture with the knight as it is and cut the hand from the first picture. But! Cutting the hand by hand (ha, humour) would be madness. 

There is a nice tool in Gimp software, that can automatically select foreground, which is apparently what I want. If I understood the stuff I found by random googling well, it works by recognizing colours (or something like that) and separating the background from the foreground based on the colours (or something like that). On my picture (that you can see above) colours are not really involved, there is just line and the rest. Which can be easily fixed by colouring the parts of the picture I want to delete with some absurd colour. Like green.

   

And then just use the foreground select tool, which is described here. This selects the hand. Then all I did was inverse the selection (Ctrl+I) and delete everything selected (Ctrl+X). It all worked surprisingly well and quickly, but it took me a while to find out what do I want and how do I do it. So maybe someone finds this helpful.

After deleting the unnecessary bits, you can just put this picture with a hand on any other picture. And make it work as one picture.

#7 Size Matters

This time, I´d like to write about something quite important, and that´s size of the frames and size of the "screen" (you know, that window on YouTube). Because it´s something I didn´t think about much and now I have problems with it.

When I started drawing the frames for my next video (all frames are drawn by the way, now I am scanning it to computer, cleaning it in gimp, and maybe in future, adding some colours and nice backgrounds if I care enough to paint them). That´s a sentence with a very long interruption in the middle, let me start again. I drew all the frames on transparent papers of size A5. And for YouTube, your video should be in 16:9 format (they recommend 1280x720 pixels).

After drawing all the frames and scanning a few, I have realized, that A5 size paper is not, in fact, 16:9. Without bothering anybody with details, the 16:9 format is wide and A5 paper is not wide. Below is a picture showing how a 16:9 frame looks like (the red line) and how one of my A5 frames look like.

It´s not very clear to me how to solve this. Stretching all my frames to get them wider is a ridiculous thought, because it would deform all the shapes, so that´s not a way. Making the frames larger (in computer) and then cutting a top strip and bottom strip is not a solution either, because the part of the frame I would have to delete would be too big. Leaving a white strip on each side of every frame (just like in the picture above) might work. Unless you have some action happening in the left or the right edge of the frame. Like I do. See below.

As I see it, there is only one way. I have tried to avoid it but I can´t. Leaving the frames as they are and having those ugly black strips on the left and right side. It´ll look like a French film from the 60s that doesn´t fit any modern screen, but I think I might get away with it if I call it vintage style video. From now, I am doing a vintage style video.

P.S. the frames on the pictures in this post are yellow. The only reason for that is to create contrast so that it´s clear that the frame is smaller than screen. The real frames are not yellow and it will not be yellow in the final video. Just explaining if anybody cared.

#6 Problems With Breathing

This time, I have decided to get the scene where the knight is just standing and breathing to a finished state. It was much worse than I expected.
During the inking process, I didn´t pay as much attention as I should have. That resulted in a terrible video, where the helmet of the knight changed shape all the time and it was incredibly messy. In this post, I´ll write about my three attempts to correct it.

Attempt 1

Now, what to do with a video where solid things change shape. I have redrawn all the frames again. It´s only 8 frames, not pleasant, but no big deal. And the result was better, but not much. The helmet needed to be the same shape the whole time, and it wasn´t.

Attempt 2

I´ve decided, that when you breath, your head doesn´t move at all (which is a lie). So I took the first frame, I have deleted everything except the head and copied it to all the other frames. Perfect, right? Now the head doesn´t change shape. Watch the video below to see the result of that.

Terrible, it looks ridiculous. He is not moving his head at all. It looks unnatural. Also, his left shoulder moves weirdly (actually, it changes shape in an unnatural way). I was quite happy about the rest. It wasn´t perfect but, I think it was good enough.

Attempt 3

My last attempt. I have decided to copy the head from first frame, just like in No. 2, but this time, I would move it slightly in every frame in the direction of the shoulders. Which means up and left. 

As you can see for yourself, still no perfection. But I think I´ll leave it like that. It is an improvement from the previous versions, and I don´t want to spend too much time on a short unimportant scene like that, which doesn´t help the story at all.

Now, Iď like to concentrate on making the scene where the knight hits the pencil (for the first time) with his shield. So, that should be topic of the next post.

#5 Some More Scenes

As promised last time, this blog post will contain some more finished scenes (finished in the vaguest possible meaning).

Scene One 

I thought it might be nice to have a scene where the knight doesn´t do anything, just waits for the next move of the artist. However, if the knight stood still, it would be like essence of boredom, he should move a little. And one of the obvious things people tend to do even when they are not doing anything is breathing. In this case, I thought the knight might be tired from all the jumping around on the paper so he might be breathing heavily. Watch the video below to see what I mean.

I have only drawn it once, of course, I just looped it four times for the blog, the timing needs some work, the breathing looks too quick to me like this. I am not sure where in the video this scene should be used, but maybe when the artist is looking for some weapons in his drawer, it might be nice to just show the knight breathing heavily. 

Scene Two

The next one is a piece where the knight hits the pencil with his shield and makes the artist drop it. Not so much to say this time, the video is below. Unlike the first video in this blog, this one seems too slow, which can be helped very easily after scanning all the frames when I will be putting the video together.

Scene Three

The last part of today´s post is about the scene where the knight avoids the hand with the eraser. This consists of three movements, firstly, the knight moves his body to the (his) left, then he raises his right leg and then he falls down on his knees. The frames in a video are below again, and as always, it needs some more work when playing the frames and timing the whole thing. Because the first two movements merged into one, which is not what I would want. So I think a longer pause between the two movements could fix the problem. 

Ok, that´s all for this time. I´ll just explain what I haven´t written before. These videos I post here are "finished" only in the meaning that I think I don´t need to draw more frames. When I draw all the frames for whole video, I will need to do some cleaning and inking, then scanning all the frames (this will be the worst part thanks to Mr. Hewlett, Mr. Packard and their stupid scanner that is only 2 months old and already doesn´t work properly), then some pc cleaning (erasing backgrounds and putting the frames together, probably in Gimp), then adding some colours, then finally making the video (probably in Windows Movie Maker, just like my first video). 

So, that´s my plan. Still a long way to go.