Gary's Anime Studio ExperimentsGary's Anime Studio Experiments is my collection of experiments, in tutorial form, put together while learning how to use Anime Studio. I hope you find them useful.
Work Flow, or Making my First Animated Film Introduction (Jan. 23-24, 2008) Now that I have a character designed, Mr. Egg Man, it's time to give some thought to what kind of stories I want to tell. Why else would I be interested in animation, except to tell stories? Inspired by some of my eariler experiments, I've decided to start out with a comedy team, Sticky and The Egg Man. What follows, for the next couple pages at least, will be the step-by-step process I use in creating a whole animated short film of 2 to 3 minutes in length. This is not the only way to approach a larger project. It might not even be a good way, let along the best way. But it's an apporach that works well for me, and so I share the method with no guarantees for how useful it might be. Preliminaries I first need to go about drawing and rigging the stick man character, "Sticky", for 3D turns, just like we've done in the last few pages for Egg Man. I won't bother going into details on that, since it pretty much duplicates what we've already done here. Instead, I'll jump ahead and get right down to movie making. Pre-Production Telling a story requires one very important ingredient right from the start: A story to tell. It may be satisfactory to start right out animating with nothing more than a rough idea of where you are going, and how you are going to tell your story, but to tell a story in the best way you can, it pays to be a little more organized than that. I'm not claiming to be a great story teller, or a great film maker, but what I am going to shoot for is the very best film that I can make. I know I can't aspire to the best, but I can certainly try for my best. And that requires devoting some attention to details. The Wishing Tree Several weeks before I first discovered Anime Studio, (I was originally thinking of using Poser for this project) I went through the story in my head and then wrote a couple revisions of the script until I was satisfied that it was pretty good. I wrote out the script in a somewhat standard format, even though I was planning to be the only voice actor for the film. Included in the script were my first thoughts about shots and camera angles, as well as any sound effects or special efects that might be necessary. Altogether, I needed these 8 sound effects
Recording the Soundtrack Using Google to search for sound effect files, I easily located the sound of footsteps on a forest path, and some bird sounds. The footsteps were not 2 per second, however, so I used the freeware sound editor program Audacity to cut apart the individual footstep sounds and paste them back toegther at half-second intervals so they would match the 24 frame walk cycle we designed in an earlier tutorial. There are quite a few sources for free sound effects on the Internet, and you shouldn't have any trouble finding them. I found a "paper_crunch.wav" that made a good crunching sound, and the world famous "Wilhelm Scream" for my scream sound. For the rest of the sound effects, I used my Korg N5 keyboard synthesizer to record them. Next, using the Audacity program mentioned above, I recorded the dialog, reading the various parts from the script. (This is when I discovered that the quality of my only microphone is very poor. I plan on re-recording the dialog sometime later when I get around to getting a better mike.) The two female voices in unison were provided by my granddaughter and her friend. I chopped up the dialog files and loaded the pieces into another handy audio editing program, Reaper, which allows you to mix multi-track recordings down to make the final soundtrack. With Reaper I can slide the pieces of dialog around to get the pacing right, and slot in the various sound effects at their proper places. Below is an example of the soundtrack Timeline for this project. The timeline ruler is set to display in Minutes, Seconds, and Frames.  Each track, dialog, music or sound effects, can be balanced and adjusted using the mixing board until you have exactly the results you want.  Soundtrack Music Choosing soundtrack music is a very personal decision. Each person has their own preferences for musical style. Myslef, I have dabbled in musical composition for years, so I write my own soundtrack music from scratch and perform it myself using the Garritan Personal Orchestra. For this project I wrote a simple, bouncy theme and scored a 15-second version for the opening title and a 26-second version for the closing credits. I added these recordings to the Reaper mix and rendered the final completed soundtrack as an MP3 file. If you like, you can listen to the complete 3-minute soundtrack including theme music here. (WARNING: Spoiler alert. If you want to wait and see the completed movie, listening to the soundtrack will spoil the ending.) Knowing What to Animate What I did next was to go through the entire soundtrack, in Reaper, and write up a log of each audio event, along with the time, in minutes, seconds, and frames, of the event. With that log in hand, you have a complete frame-by-frame roadmap of what needs to appear in the animation. Here's the timeline log for The Wishing Tree: Planning the Shots With the timelime log in hand, we can start planning what each shot will contain. For example, we know that there will be an openning title sequence before the story begins, and that it will last 384 frames (16 seconds). We know that at 43 seconds plus 5 frames we need a sequence 60 frames long with a shimmering effect and a stack of gold appearing at exactly frame 42. We know that we need 168 frames where Sticky is walking with a pile of gold in his hands, and the gold vanishes at frame 73, and starting in frame 102 he faces the camera and says "Hey! Where's my gold." In other words, the timeline log gives up everything we need to set up each animation sequence. We can either set up each shot as a separate Anime Studio project file, or we can set up the entiure movie as one large anme file. For a large project, it is probably best to break it down into scenes, or sections, but for a movie this short, we might as well put the whole thing into one Anime Studio project. That way we don't have to worry about importing the characters and scenery into seperate projects. It also makes it easier to synchronize the soundtrack, since the Anime Studio timeline for the project will match perfectly the Reaper soundtrack timeline. Storyboarding Directly in Anime Studio Going through the log, decide how to break up the story into shots. Decide when to use a long shot with both characters and the tree, and when to use a close-up, or an over-the-shoulder dialog shot of a single character. Perhaps jot down on a printed copy of the timeline log, exactly at which frame you intend to start a new shot. Then go to Anime Studio and set up that shot, with all the bits of scenery and the characters that will be in the shot. Don't do anyt animation yet. Just set up the scene as a static stage set. Once you've done that, you should be able to play through the entire movie seeing a series of still shots for what will become each new animated shot in the final movie. That way you can get an idea of how the visual progression of the story works out. Once you have each still scene set up the way you want, you can egin the job of animating the action that needs to happen in each shot. Consulting the soundtrack timeline log we see that the movie ends with the final fade to black at 3:06:22, or 186 seconds plus 22 frames, for a grand total of 4464 frames at 24 frames per second. Ideally, I would create a new Anime Studio project and set the Project Settings to 4464 frames. The problem is, the basic non-Pro version of Anime Studio only allows a project to have 3000 frames. That limits us to 125 seconds, or 2 minutes and 5 seconds. One alternative is to set up the opening title sequence and the closing credits sequence in their own seperate Anime Studio files and edit them together later in Quick Time Pro. The opening title sequence will be 16 seconds long and the closing credits sequence will be 26 seconds plus 10 frames long, for a total of 32 seconds plus 10 frames, or 778 frames. That leaves the actual movie with 4464 - 778 = 3686 frames. Still too long for Anime Studio basic. The other alternative is to chop the movie into two roughly equal chunks of around 2200 frames, or 90 to 95 seconds each. That works out at somewhere around 1:30:00 as a good place to split the project. at 1:28:23 Sticky says "Hey, I'm getting hungry. I wish we had something to eat." and at 01:33:15 we cut to a new shot of the food appearing. If we have Sticky's line as the last shot of the first project file, we can have the food appearing as the first shot of the second project file. Then we can paste the two files together in QuickTime Pro and add the soundtrack after we've cut them together. To make the timeline log more convenient to use, we can also split that into 2 chunks, starting the timing over at 00:00:00 in the second chunk so that the soundtrack timeline values of the second chunk will match the timelines in AS for the second chunk. Now our soundtrack timeline log looks somethnig like this: Since I have already worked out a first draft of the opening title sequence, I will include that in the storyboard version. The remaining scenes are the still arranged in AS at the assigned frames in the soundtrack timeline log. When a scene calls for characters to walk, or the camera to pan or zoom, I will put in simple translations and zooms just to indicate the desired motion. The details will be worked out later on a shot-by-shot basis. For now, backgrounds and miscellaneous object that haven't been created yet are replaced by temporary stand-in images, or simple text saying what will be there. The first part of the resulting storyboarded version looks like this: One thing that the storyboard reveals is that some additional sound effects will be needed. There are places where characters have to be walking, to make the scene work, but I didn't put footstep sounds in the original soundtrack. Once I know where those need to be, I'll go back to the soundtrack mix and add them. Since I'm not sure how long all the animation will take, the next tutorial won't be posted until after that task is done. Then I'll share any discoveries I make along the way. Next Up: What I Learned From My First Animation
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