I love the timing of the animation, especially the end when so little time is left for the victory...yup, back to work for our little man with a stick.
Did you know about 17th century pikemen? Whole military groupings of men with pointy sticks. I used to think that it was something that Monty Python made up.
No, I didn't know about pikemen, except what I might have seen in old paintings, and Monty Python.
Thanks for your comment(s). I've never done anything like this animation before so it's good to get some feedback.
Boring backstory details: I started without any preconceived idea. Each frame suggested what the next frame should be. It was very interesting because I've never done judo or any serious wrestling, but I had to visualize the moves and make them as true as I could to the physics of the struggle. About a third of the way in I had to start "plotting"--"OK, I want the stick guy to flip the lizard over, which means I've got to get the stick guy over to the right side, otherwise the lizard will fly out of the frame. And he's gonna have to be ready to whack the lizard while it's stunned from the flip, which means the flip's gotta be hard and at the same time he's gotta be getting himself in position to land the blow." That kind of thing. I learned a lot doing it.
I like the pike blocking the bite. Didn't see it the first couple of times I watched.
it is also sexual, in a way
yes, reminds me of my sex life
What did you use to make it?
37 drawings in MSPaint, strung together in a gif-builder program called GIF Construction Set. I'm sure there are animation programs out there that would automate half the stuff I did by hand (like keeping the character proportions roughly the same from frame to frame, which was a struggle not completely resolved, or generating "transition frames") but my art is about being lazy using programs with the fewest number of menu-steps and doing an unnecessary amount of hand labor to compensate.
Does GCS do onion skinning? (Can you see the previous and next few frames in a highly transparent way right over the top of the frame you are working on?) Without that feature making animated .gifs is much more difficult.
No onion skinning (as far as I know). I do the next drawing over the first, in the same frame, and gradually remove the lines of the old drawing. Not so hard when the image is this simple. In a separate window, I have thumbnails of all the drawings viewable in XP so I can see where I've been and think about where I need to go. I know from Photoshop that I'm impatient working with any kind of layers, so I don't know if onion skinning is something I want. I'd have to try a program that had it.
Cool that it so "low-tech". Figuring out how to do something on a computer like that is to me like trying to figure out how to draw something I find hard to draw, like a tree. Mind-stretching.
why does this make me think of keith haring?
Several of us in Toronto agree that our favourite bit is when the victor sticks his arms up at the end.
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- tom moody 6-09-2004 9:09 am
I love the timing of the animation, especially the end when so little time is left for the victory...yup, back to work for our little man with a stick.
Did you know about 17th century pikemen? Whole military groupings of men with pointy sticks. I used to think that it was something that Monty Python made up.
- LM (guest) 6-09-2004 7:59 pm
No, I didn't know about pikemen, except what I might have seen in old paintings, and Monty Python.
Thanks for your comment(s). I've never done anything like this animation before so it's good to get some feedback.
Boring backstory details: I started without any preconceived idea. Each frame suggested what the next frame should be. It was very interesting because I've never done judo or any serious wrestling, but I had to visualize the moves and make them as true as I could to the physics of the struggle. About a third of the way in I had to start "plotting"--"OK, I want the stick guy to flip the lizard over, which means I've got to get the stick guy over to the right side, otherwise the lizard will fly out of the frame. And he's gonna have to be ready to whack the lizard while it's stunned from the flip, which means the flip's gotta be hard and at the same time he's gotta be getting himself in position to land the blow." That kind of thing. I learned a lot doing it.
- tom moody 6-10-2004 6:18 am
I like the pike blocking the bite. Didn't see it the first couple of times I watched.
- mark 6-10-2004 6:28 am
it is also sexual, in a way
- anonymous (guest) 6-10-2004 7:46 am
yes, reminds me of my sex life
- shreve (guest) 6-10-2004 7:42 pm
What did you use to make it?
- shreve (guest) 6-10-2004 7:42 pm
37 drawings in MSPaint, strung together in a gif-builder program called GIF Construction Set. I'm sure there are animation programs out there that would automate half the stuff I did by hand (like keeping the character proportions roughly the same from frame to frame, which was a struggle not completely resolved, or generating "transition frames") but my art is about being lazy using programs with the fewest number of menu-steps and doing an unnecessary amount of hand labor to compensate.
- tom moody 6-11-2004 10:52 am
Does GCS do onion skinning? (Can you see the previous and next few frames in a highly transparent way right over the top of the frame you are working on?) Without that feature making animated .gifs is much more difficult.
- jim 6-11-2004 7:35 pm
No onion skinning (as far as I know). I do the next drawing over the first, in the same frame, and gradually remove the lines of the old drawing. Not so hard when the image is this simple. In a separate window, I have thumbnails of all the drawings viewable in XP so I can see where I've been and think about where I need to go. I know from Photoshop that I'm impatient working with any kind of layers, so I don't know if onion skinning is something I want. I'd have to try a program that had it.
- tom moody 6-11-2004 8:07 pm
Cool that it so "low-tech". Figuring out how to do something on a computer like that is to me like trying to figure out how to draw something I find hard to draw, like a tree. Mind-stretching.
- shreve (guest) 6-11-2004 11:58 pm
why does this make me think of keith haring?
- anonymous (guest) 6-13-2004 4:18 am
Several of us in Toronto agree that our favourite bit is when the victor sticks his arms up at the end.
- sally mckay 6-13-2004 10:59 am