How To Make a Cartoon | For Beginners - After Effects Tutorial

For my name project and main project I needed to make characters for my plot and I wasn't exactly sure how to go about it, and this tutorial really helped me understand how to do it! This YouTuber has a lot of great tutorials on after effects that you guys should check out if need any help with certain aspects of After Effects! 

a 3D look but a 2D Feel

I am a huge fan of traditional 2D animation. I love how ridiculously expressive you can make the characters, and I love how you don't need to depend on the physics of the real world to make your cartoon enjoyable. When I see films like Disney's frozen I ask myself the question of "Why did this need to be animated" or rather "What is animation adding to this story". And to be frank I don't know that I've found an answer aside from the fact that having 3D models of every character comes in real handy when rolling out lines of action figures and other such merch.

It's not that I don't like 3D animation in general. I just feel that it can get so close to the look of the real world that any abstraction would severely disturb the audience watching.

Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs was a 3D animated film produced by Sony Studios that I feel captures some of the very best that 2D and 3D animation have to offer. Take a look at the clip below:

While the look of the film is undoubtedly 3D, it really does feel like you're watching 2D cartoon. The characters move erratically  and emote expressively, you can see during periods of fast movement that someone has actually gone in and drawn smears and multiples into the 3D frame, and whatsmroe is that it never takes itself too seriously.

Like I said before, I don't have a problem with 3D animation as a medium, but I'd love to see it used to it's full potential.

"Devour" Commercial

The M&M's commercials are always some of my favorites.  They take inanimate candies and give them life, and the commercials are always funny and enjoyable to watch.  There is an art to their commercials too.  They really use precise and detailed animations to create the M&M characters.  They have very specific personalities through the details they are given.  

But the animators do something great.  They insert these characters into real life footage.  I'm sure that the process is difficult.  My guess on how they do something like this is that they take a similar approach to what we have been learning in class with the "inserting ourselves into a movie" project.  There must be a way to simply take the animation and place it into the footage.  I doubt a green screen is used, but maybe it is for some parts.

Here is a commercial that I'm talking about...

EXIT 73 Studios: Coin

     Recently I was scrolling along our blog page and stumbled upon the link to the site Motionographer. I found a short little animation called "Coin" created by a small animation and motion graphics company in James-port, NY that specializes in animation production and graphic design. "Coin" was directed and animated by Chris Burns with music, sound design and composition by Bob Fox. "Coin" is a 2D 8-bit animation that plays homage to games from the past. The animation takes the viewer on  a nostalgic journey through many environments such as underwater and outer space that include references to many of the games in our early childhood which inevitably faded out due to better technology. While only a team of two EXIT 73 Studios stands tall among its peers with its precise animation, overwhelming creativity and lastly experience to keep the company moving in the right direction. Chris Burns has been an animator for over 10 years working for prestigious clients such as Disney, Fox, Adult Swim, Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon. Additionally Bob Fox partner of Burns has worked for such clients as Disney, Nickelodeon, MTV and IFC. Enjoy as "Coin" takes you through some of the most memorable video games of all time.

Exit 73 Studios

                 


A few other examples of EXIT 73 Studios notable works:

                  

                    

Pixar Short Films

This is one of my favorite animated short films.  Before the Pixar movie, A Bug's Life, this short film played.  I was five-years-old and I still remember this.  It is amazing that this short film with no diaglogue captivated me at that young age.  This is animation at its finest.  Pixar has a ton movies, but this is still by far my favortie animated short film of all time.

Pirates of the Caribbean Animation

While researching computer generated make-up, I discovered something about the Pirates of the Caribbean series, and specifically Davy Jones, that shocked me more than I should have been. In my last post I talked about how I'm really not a fan of CG characters because they look too hologram-esque and take me out of the story. Well, that was never the case with Pirates. In fact, I didn't think Pirates had any CGI besides making Davy Jones's tentacles move and the guy with the shell head become decapitated. But today was different:

today, I learned that 100% of Davy Jones and his crew were animated. 

This is silly because apparently everyone else knew that they were completely computer generated, but I seemed to miss that. I assumed that there was some sort of CGI, but I believed that Bill Nighy was at least wearing a costume. No. I was wrong. Very, very wrong. So I decided to research the process of creating the army of sea-men, and I discovered even more; almost everything involved some sort of CGI. The ships were detailed, the actors were added, layers of foreground were created, and the entire set was formed.

So in the previous video you see the before and after for almost everything that had CG help, but not much of the process was explained so I continued my research. (For the next video, I'm sorry about the noise in the background but I thought the process was really interesting to watch and I quite enjoy the detail they show us.) 

Now unfortunately there is one really cool link that shows the full pictures of before and after for each individual character but I am not allowed to embed the video on the blog, so here's the link. For the basic idea what it shows you, however, here is a photograph.

Again, I guess I was the only one who didn't notice that Pirates had a ton of CG because there are countless videos and websites dedicated to detailing and explaining the process of creating POTC. It truly amazes me because I honestly thought that each character had some sort of costume or make-up and then the artists just went back later to animate them. There is so much detail required for the process and I am so spellbound by the amount of work that goes into creating these movies. It goes over so many peoples' heads, especially the general audience members, and I think motion graphics is really an under-appreciated art that should be explored more.

I was recently thinking about how a lot of memorable characters in some of the best films are animated. Characters like Yoda from Star Wars, Dobby from Harry Potter and Gollum from The Lord of the Rings are all known and loved around the world. These characters all work opposite of live-action actors, and yet oftentimes, they are the ones that steal the scene. Animators create the look of the character, but also the emotions behind the character. It's fascinating to me that animators are able to create the emotions that make us fall in love with these characters.

I was curious as to how they go about creating entire characters from scratch and found an interesting article on how Gollum was created. This article describes the extremely detailed process of creating Gollum and all that went into it. Gollum is a very detailed character and the animators started by making a life-size sculpture of what they wanted him to look like. Then they scanned the sculpture and this data gave them the exact measurements for the computer model. One thing I found particularly interesting in the making of Gollum is that they did not use motion capture to animate Gollum's face, but rather recorded the actor playing him doing hundreds of different facial expressions. Then they recreated these expressions using key-frame techniques. The amount of time and work that goes into this is amazing.

I also came across an article on the 10 best CGI characters of all time that was very interesting.