Tuesday 13 September 2016

Explanation of Absence: Mrs D Tries To Animate..Again

Well, has your heart grown fonder during my absence? Perhaps not. I don't blame you. First rule of blogging. Post something.

But I can't drag Mrs D away from her latest obsession in order to help post something here. And her latest obsession involves drawing away on that graphics tablet. More to the point - trying to find a way to make hand-drawn animation. Yes. You have read me right. Having gone on for years about filming stop motion animation ... like what I be made for ... now she wants to draw it.

Do not hold your breath. There won't be a feature-length film anytime soon for it has been a saga. First it was a question of software. She tried downloading various software testers. The first would not run at all and her computer skills were not up to curing that problem. Then she tried  a second program - which was bit temperamental. She started to make it work but couldn't transfer the end product into a watchable media file! Others? Well, one look at the interface was enough to leave her jaw slack and her eyes glazing. And they are so varied as to how they operate. Bless her she is a simple old-fashioned girl and she did want to just "draw" the thing... like bitmap stuff. She cannot yet do this vector stuff, nor Flash, nor 3D rendering....

Anyhoo. She is currently practicing a very complicated work around involving using layered images in her ancient graphics package and turning each layer into a separate image file and importing the sequence into her current (rapidly aging version) of Stopmotion Pro package... which (bless it ) do allow you to import image files. So far... enough is happening to keep her glued to a stylus most afternoons. I'll show you a sequence of images. They are based on her Syb & Me project. What do you think?