working with drawings

[David Slingerland]

a possible new client would like to do some animation with drawings. He has no money for real animation so is looking for stuff that comes close. slow zooms , pans left to right I can imagine. But zooms tend to degrade the quality of the pictures, I am wondering also if FCP would be the right program for this sort of thing. any suggestions?? also on effects I could use ??

[Jeff Price]

If you start out with higher resolution (scan/digital photo) then zooming may not degrade the quality that much.

[David Slingerland]

Jeff I was actually thinking of filming the drawings but you are probably right in telling me that scanning would give better resolution? Photograpy is no option as this would require expensive camera's with special lenses I think

[Jeff Price]

Scanning should certainly give you better resoution. You could do it all with a video camera and a good tripod (zooming and panning) but I think the scan would probably look better to your client.

[Ted Springer]

How are drawings not "real animation"? Animation is something that is composed of several individual frames to create an artificial sense of motion. Snow White was drawings, and it most certainly is animation.

Are you talking about just zooming and panning across a picture? If so, then the word "animation" doesn't belong anywhere near here. Check out the app called "Photo to Movie". Nothing is better for that purpose.

[David Slingerland]

Well Ted ofcourse I mean stills not animated drawings. But the program you suggested seems just like what I need. Can you tell me anything about its quality? Have you used it yourself? I mean when you output to DV and would like to import it in to FCP to add subtitels and voiceover. The project will be children story told by voiceover and some "animation" like described above.

[Ted Springer]

The quality is great. I'd suggest playing around with it a bit before attempting any "for real" stuff. It's not hard to learn, but you will want to get a good feel for it first. The quality is great (just as long as your stills have enough resolution). Even on lower res stills, it isn't bad. Give it a try. It has a free demo version that imprints the word "DEMO" over the screen or something like that.

[Jeff Patnaude]

Sounds like he wants an animatronic. I think thats what its called. I remember seing those of commericlas before they were shot. They pre-visualize the shots with illustrations first on bigger-budget shoots.

Jeff

[Jeff Price]

I think the term you are looking for may be animatic. If you watch the making of features for Lord of the Rings you will see some footage where you have actors and sketched in effects.

[Jeff Patnaude]

HA!
Thank you Jeff!
animatronic is something totally different.
Brain Fart!

Jeff Patnaude

[Peter Wiley]

If you have AE and photoshop here's a thing to try.

Have the client draw characters on white paper and also backgrounds. Scan the characters and backgrounds. Use photoshop to remove the white background from the the characters -- so that their backgrounds are transparent.

Import the characters and the backgrounds into AE on separate layers. Then animate the character layers over the backgrounds. There is a lot you can do with clever scaling and cutting with this method.

I did this we some drawings my daughter made once and it works rather well to produce very stylized animation.

[Mike Butler]

David, I have done plenty of pan & zoom in FCP, it's just a matter of setting keyframes. Your quality will be a function of the resolution of your still images, so they need to be large enough to support your tightest zoom. If you are scanning the drawings yourself, you can control it. I do it with digital photos and also with scans of hard copy. Some would call this the Ken Burns technique.

[David Slingerland]

thanks everyone for the advice. I am going to look in to everything.