Friday, May 15, 2009

Star Fetch Episode 2: Pre-Production/Production


It takes a long time to bring a story into a fully animated version. Take Star Fetched episode 1 for example. It took Jason and I almost a year to finish the five minute episode. Everything you see in the show had to be created. Jason made most of the objects and characters.

The script was completed several years ago, but it needed to be edited. After that we had our actors record their voices for the characters. I then took all the audio and put it together so each character played against one another, kind of like a radio drama. Next we took the audio and matched the character's movements and mouths. That was the most time consuming part of the animation process. It can also get quite boring, listening to the same line over and over, trying to determine what mouth shapes should go with what syllables.

The final step was to make any of the visual effects. It wouldn't be very interesting just to watch five minutes of characters talking to themselves, so we put in exterior views of the ships, and showed the story that Bob and Jonas relayed.

Now after almost five months, we're still in the early stages with episode 2. This episode will be longer by more than 50%, so it will take us quite some time to complete it. Thankfully we learned quite a few things animating episode 1 as well as the several Midieville shorts we created in 2007 and 2008.

If you have any questions (or suggestions) about the animation process, please comment.

Thanks,

Andy

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