A very short animation. Funny lol
If you liked this, please check out my youtube channel!
Notes on how I made it:
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When recording the 2nd voice, I kept laughing so much, that I couldn’t do one full good take. So I just combined 2 separate takes. Did anyone notice it’s 2 takes?
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I used Blender (it’s free!). It’s a 3d model using line art and flat shading. (Did you think it was hand-drawn? Let me know)
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3D MODEL:
At first, I used a tutorial on making Steven Universe in 3d and used that. But I thought, I don’t wanna copy an existing character, in case that’s copyright infringement. So I tried just making the head skinnier, but wasn’t enough. So i drastically changed the hair and yeah, sure don’t look like Steven Universe no more! (that show has FANTASTIC music. Funny show, too.) -
LINE ART:
I used a modifier or 2 to make the lines look more hand-drawn. What do you think? -
SHADING:
This is viewport shading, set to Flat, with shadows turned on. I made the shadow lines sharp(?) because if they blur, I find it really breaks the illusion of hand-drawn.
If I make a bigger animation with actual characters and scenery, I’ll probably have to relearn how to use actual lights and shaders in blender, because controlling the viewport’s “lamp” isn’t very… uh… permanent? -
ANIMATION:
It’s not a lot of keyframes, actually. Most of it is video-editing the animation with panning and zooming in the video editor (also done in Blender. Yes, Blender can edit videos. Is it a good video editor? I have no idea). I find that panning the actual 3d camera breaks the hand-drawn illusion (unless you use an orthographic camera, but that’s kinda weird to use since you can’t actually zoom in with those. You have to change the camera’s size or something to ‘zoom in’). -
IDEA AND PROCESS
Initially, i saw a post here asking someone to make their webcomic characters in 3d so that they could pose it for their comic iirc. They never replied to me, which works out cuz it turns out I’m not yet ready for that (it takes me a long time to model a full 3d character from scratch).
So i made the character laugh (same animation in this video).
I forgot about it and did other stuff (e.g. music).
and a few days ago, I just thought let me make a video editing tutorial on how to pan and zoom. This pan and zoom animation was meant to be an intro, showing the panning/zooming in action.
It was supposed to be more of an epic hero-staring-down-a-bad-guy type scene, but I ended up making it funny instead, i think cuz that’s way easier! -
MUSIC:
I made the simple music using Garageband on iPhone.
I knew I wanted to end it on an a-minor chord, cuz that’s easily a spooky chord.
I made it an Adim chord instead cuz diminished chords are more jarring and therefore more scary!!! OOooOoOoooo!!
I had to play around to figure out the first 4 notes. but it didn’t take long.