Hi,
I was wondering what the process would be for taking an existing piece of art and animating it. I’m talking about a comic book that I want to look like a cartoon.
Any help would be appreciated.
Spike
They have been doing motion graphic novels lately in the animation industry. Basically, they take the pre-existing panels, scan everything, and animate it in Adobe After Effects. But for someone who knows nothing about this, it will be a long and hard road. I personally find Adobe After Effects to be a hag to work with, but others I know seem to pick it up pretty quickly. It depends on the individual, I guess, but for someone who does not know what they are doing, I imagine it would be very difficult to get the result you are looking for.
Actually, it would be a lot easier than starting from scratch.
Many filmmakers, whether animation or liveaction, use storyboards to plan the direction of their films. Since a comic strip is a storyboard, you already have the movie planned out. All that needs to be done is the construction of sets and models, and the animating.
If you don’t know how to use Blender but make comic strips, perhaps you should take up the task of learning it. After you get a few months under your belt and learn the basics, you might be surprised how easy it becomes.
If not, you could start an artwork thread, post all of your comic strips, and then try to put together a team of animators who are interested in bring what you’ve done to the screen. There are plenty of people here on BA who have some serious chops as animators, modellers, compositors and directors. But the one thing we hardly ever talk about is STORY. And story is the most important factor in determining what will be a fun project to work on and something that might be good, and something that won’t.
If you’re saying that you’ve already done some comics, I think I’d take the later route. Give it a shot. Explain, as you did in the OP, that you aren’t an animator and have never learned Blender or CG, but you’d like to see if anyone might be interested in directing a short or two. That would get the ball rolling, and it might be a lot of fun. Along the way, you might even decide to start learning the artform yourself.
Either way, it’s an interesting topic.
But, to answer your original question directly, the process is usually this:
Comic strip to storyboard.
Storyboard to animatic.
Animatic to more detailed modelling, voice acting, more detailed animating, composting.
Rendering.
Opening day on YouTube.
Thence to FAME, FORTUNE AND GLORY!!!
Here’s an animatic example by way of Blender Foundation’s current Project Mango open-movie (COMING SOON to a YouTube near you!)…
