I can't believe something so crappy-looking was so hard to make.
Okay, so it was 11:30 pm and I was bored. So I had this great idea of making a little animation. I had never made an animation before. I didn't have tutorials and I didn't know how. But what the hey, I was bored.
Animation takes a LOT of paper. I don't have a sketchbook and I just draw on whatever paper is in my house. Seeing as how I didn't want to waste paper, I drew every frame on one-sided grid paper.
For some of the frames I had the help of a light desk, which makes it easier to trace. I don't recommend to anyone to take this up as a hobby, it's VERY boring sitting and drawing a bunch of pictures that are identical save for slight movement.
Scanning them was easy, but took a long time, since there were so many frames (Hey, I'm not a professional. I'm in awe of the professionals, who make hundreds and thousands of them every day as their living). Having done that, I then had to go over every frame, resize them and clean them up. Damn you gridlines!
Now that all the frames are on the computer, I opened Photoshop 5.5. I arranged all the frames on a new file, each one on a separate layer to make them easier to move. Here's what it looked like:
I converted each individual layer to a .gif file. Then I opened up the Animation Shop that comes with Paintshop Pro 6 and used Animation Wizard.
Click here to see it!
Still crappy looking, but at least she can move.
Now comes the incredibly boring part. Coloring each little frame. This was totally mindless work, but trust me when I say it's incredibly boring (And usually I LIKE Cg!)
Click here to see it
Finally I added a background, fine-tuned it, and made the entire file smaller. Each time you do something, you have to resave everything, every frame, which was very annoying.
Some people notices that Kayla "freezes" mid-jump. The reason for this was because I wanted to make it look like Cybersix jumping in the first episode, Mysterious Shadows. At the climax of her leap, she hangs there for a moment, airborne, before coming down again.
Which brings you back to this crappy thing. :P
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