How I Make My Animations
Normally animations are made by crews of artists, from dozens to hundreds, who contribute pieces of a puzzle that are assembled into a whole finished product. By contrast, all of my animations are made by one guy. I do it all, from writing to storyboards, from finished art to special effects, from music to sound design. The whole kit and caboodle. Overall, the steps remain the same, they just aren't delegated to a team. I am the team.
Like most any animated work, the process begins with a story, which eventually grows to become a script. And just as it is for Pixar, my script can go through many, many revisions before any physical work is done.
When I have some usable dialog, I turn to an online application called Voicemaker to bring life to the written word. Voicemaker is a powerful tool that can produce remarkable results. The range of controls over their synthetic actors improves steadily, and sometimes the results can be emotionally affecting.
In the meantime,
I am also beginning work on the necessary art (above). Here I must point out that I use absolutely
no AI to generate images. With the exception of a very few special visual effects created using an ancient
version of Winamp, a music visualizer (5.8, released 2018), all of the art is done by hand using an ordinary
drawing application. In my case, it's an old version of CorelDraw (X8, 2016), which is paired with PhotoPaint (Corel's
version of Photoshop). All images are exported as large .png files for import into Sony Movie Studio Platinum.
Released in 2012, Movie Studio version 12 (above) is my workhorse. Sony has since returned the application to the original developer, Magix of Germany. I attempted to upgrade, twice in fact, and found that Magix has totally ruined the user interface, as well as some basic functionality. For instance, videos are now assembled in layers top down, instead of the more intuitive bottom-up. I also found that the much-touted app has a worse chroma keyer than its ten-year-old predecessor. I'm pretty happy with what I have, except that it's the buggiest software I've seen; I can crash it with one click, and sometimes it will crash all by itself: I can launch the program and it may crash the moment it finishes launching!
Granted, I really push it to its limits. It can only handle 20 video and 20 audio tracks — but not both at once! If I have a really complex animation that uses most or all of the 40 total tracks, the app will crash during rendering. My workaround is to complete the soundtrack and render it separately; then cut the visuals to the pre-rendered sound.
Incidentally, I do music production with Sony ACID Music Studio (version 8 from 2010, above). Like Movie Studio, Sony returned it to Magix, who subsequently ruined the user interface. No matter; the sixteen-year-old app gets the job done.
Movie Studio is where all the magic happens. Animation is accomplished one of two ways: either through image manipulation (pan, zoom, filters, etc.), or the old-fashioned way: assembling sequences one frame at a time. All of the lip syncing is done frame-by-frame (actually, 3-frame steps*). Sounds tedious, and it is. But it's also satisfying.
After recording all of the dialog, audio cutting begins. When I start to hear the actual dialog come together, it's rare I don't make any revisions. But once the dialog is locked in, I begin sound design, perhaps my favorite part of cartooning. I go the extra mile to do the very best sound design that I can: I find it greatly enhances enjoyment of the animation — poor sound design can pull you right out of a story.
Then begins the review process: I will burn whatever I've got done to disc and watch it a few dozen times on the big screen. Even then, little mistakes can escape notice. But more important than finding errors is making sure the story flows naturally and hangs together.
Once the audio mix is set in stone, the animation begins. The first pass is to establish the basic visual flow, roughing in settings and character groups. At this point it's much like an animatic, or video storyboard. I'll play this several times too. Often I'll put it on just before bed, and fall asleep watching it. You'd be surprised how many ideas I wake up with in my head!
After most all of the visuals are assembled an edited, lip-syncing begins. I leave for last because if I happen to make any changes in a scene, I have to start over. Lip-syncing is accomplished with 6-8 basic mouth shapes. However, each mouth shape involves the entire head, since I articulate the jaw with mouth movements. Compare this to classic anime, where the whole face is stationary, and just the mouth moves. This is much more economical, but in my book properly articulating the jaw and face is far better-looking. Overall, expressions are governed principally through the eyes, and I'll have anywhere from a dozen to over 50 eyes for any given character. Eyes are rendered on a transparent background, so they just drop in over the head.
A typical 5-minute episode will take one to two weeks to complete. However, since I've revamped my animation style (an example of the style change is shown above: Feini, before and after), production time has nearly doubled. No matter; I'm retired and not going anywhere. Besides, Pixar and their ilk spend years making a single feature, so my production schedule is not as onerous as it may sound.
*Why 3-frame steps for lip syncing? First, if I was doing it single-frame, I'd still be working on my first cartoon. And second, oddly enough, it looks better. When it's done single-frame, the mouth looks unnaturally "jittery" owing to an insufficient number of mouth shapes, as well as imperfect transitions from frame to frame. At any rate, I am thankful for getting a better-looking effect for roughly one-third the work.