Wednesday February 27, 2002

3 minutes of excellence

Timing on my computer, viewing the animations in Javascript format, episodes 1-3 plus the trailer come to 175 seconds of Chickenman viewing. Add in the credits and drafts and you have well over 3 minutes of groundbreaking asciimation excellence!

(This may not seem like a lot: but if you're not convinced, try it and find out how much time it actually takes!)

Chickenman FAQ

         Ww    I hate
   ,-.   oo   bad hair
  (   ) <      days!
   `+'   ./
    8 _,.^\
    '`-, C :
        ===6,
        |^| Y,
       .|||
       ~-~-

1. Are those MM characters part of Chickenman's head?

   Yes. That's his hair!

   This is all part of the fun of Ascii art... The C on his chest however, represents an actual 'C' (the logo on his superhero suit).

2. The animation goes too fast: Why? Because slowing down an animation is hard (or can be). I'm learning a lot about timing: right now, I think this is one of the hardest/most important things to learn about animation.
   • Sometimes it's very easy to just hold frames for longer. For example, at the end of every 'speech bubble' or important action, I tend to hold the action for between 1000ms - 5000ms. Obviously, when you are constantly viewing an animation while designing it, and you know the plot, there is a big temptation to speed up to get it over and done with. You have to pull yourself back and slow it right down. Sometimes I forget to do this...
   • At other times you can't just pause: something else is moving (for example: the wheels of the car in Ep2), or you want to create a sense of urgency by starting a move then. This means that you need to create in between frames, and that means more drawing and more design. This takes time.
   • Sometimes I've experimented with having more than one thing happening at once (like Chickenman talking while getting out of the car). I don't think that this is bad in itself - The Simpsons has all kinds of things going on all the time. One difference is that the people who create the Simpsons are better writers and animators, and have better timing... (The other difference is, I think, that, until you get used to decoding Ascii images, your brain is actively working on making these strings of characters into pictures, while reading other strings - the speech bubbles - as plain text. This takes longer to change your attention to another part of the screen. Unlike a conventional cartoon, where the speech is naturally represented by real sound...)

Episode 4 update

Episode 4 is coming along nicely. Since my last entry about it, I've simplified the shading for the swinging of the door, and pruned some scenes. It looks less fussy now: probably it's less accurate in its rendering of light and dark, but this is a cartoon, not high art, so I'll let it pass...

But I'm not sure that it will be ready for Friday. (But I have a backup plan, so it's still worth checking back then!) Firstly because I'm not 100% sure about the script (second half), and secondly because working with large quantities of shadow presents some new technical issues.

For example, in drawing speech bubbles, you have to add some whitespace to let the text stand out against the 'dark' background (e.g. of 8s.)

+---------------------------------------+
|                    8888888888888888888|
|                    8888888888888888888|
|                    8888888888888888888|
|                    888888P     Y888888|
|     Hello          888888 Hello 888888|
|     World          888888 World 888888|
|                    888888b     d888888|
|                    8888888888888888888|
|                    8888888888888888888|
|                    8888888888888888888|
+---------------------------------------+

Notice the corner characters: P Y b d which give the dark box the impression that it is curved around the text. This is a classic Ascii art 'anti-aliasing' technique.

Obviously, to animate text appearing and disappearing, as I do with Chickenman, will also be more work against a dark background. Here's a quick example of animating the above text (.gif and Javascript formats).

The other fun task is adding the shadows to the characters. I really don't know how to do this realistically, so I'm using the auxhiliary lines and pretty much guessing where to draw the shadows... I start by animating the movements of Chickenman and Red Ted, and go back to adding the shadows after. (Otherwise it would get complicated cutting and pasting and having to remember to delete the shadows).

All in all, I think it looks OK - but if any kind Ascii-artist would care to either diddle the scenes, or give me a lesson in perspective drawing, I'd welcome it!