Tuesday Musings - More Joys of New Software

 When a new piece of software is learnable without a HUGE headache and gives the kind of results one was hoping for, it's win/win! As  I outlined last week, I've been learning how to use Cartoon Animator 4 by Reallusion and it's been delivering what I need at this point in time! It's quite flexible, with several different ways of going about creating 2D characters, and even 2D characters with the illusion of semi-3D (if that's even a thing). I started out trying one scene from episode 4 of the new season of the web series with it, and have to date finished three complete episodes with it! I really like the play of dimensions for the backgrounds and the ability to manipulate the characters. One of my very favourite parts of planning a project is designing and layering backgrounds, so this illusion of moving through space is really fun to play with! It's a different look than the usual stop-motion and motion graphics mix I use for the series, but this story arc takes place on a mystical island, so it seemed appropriate to give it a slightly different look. I think going forward I will be using this software a lot, and mixing it with my stop-motion elements and straightforward and simple motion graphics into a new pipeline is going to be a very fun experiment. Here's some sneak peeks of scenes created with this new software:

Panning and zooming give the illusion of actually moving through the space, and even into other rooms!

My rats can talk now (at least move their lips - they could always talk).

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UPDATES!

"Joyfully" has been awarded "Best Animated Short" by World Premiere Film Awards!

"Requiem for the Lost" has been selected to screen at the Miniature Film Festival in Vancouver, BC, on November 7th! This festival specializes in one-minute films, and has a theme each year. This year's theme was "Hope".