Category Archives: Animation

Dante’s Inferno: The Game

by Editor

Improving upon the most boring character in the history of world literature, Electronic Arts is going to release an action game called Dante’s Inferno.  From the looks of the preview, this version of the Dante character is much more interesting and capable than the literary original who is the main character in the Divine Comedy trilogy consisting of the epic poems called Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.  Author Dante Alighieri wrote himself into his epic poem as a rather stolid, questioning dullard who follows the ghost of Virgil around in hell.  He whines about all the people who did him wrong in life and coincidentally runs into almost all of them during his sour-grapes tour of Satan’s domain.  But this video version of Dante kicks some smokin’ butt.  This is the Dante I’ve been waiting for and I am going to relish using my Xbox controller to stomp around and cut the heads off some nasty devils and repentant sinners.

It’s probably best to at least read Inferno before playing so that you can agree with me on how to improve the irritating main character.  But I will credit Mr. Dante Alighieri with one major achievement: he seems to have invented multi-level game play.  His version of hell is a series of rings that descend toward the most terrible of sins and punishments.  That’s pretty much the definition of modern computer gaming.

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Someone: CG Animation

by Editor

DeK at No fat clips!!! pointed me to this CG film by Magali Barbe and Jean Constantial. It looks painted, like oil paint strokes and spatters. It’s mysterious and I like it. Lots of reflections and a lone figure trying to differentiate and perhaps become individual.

Animation: The Astronomer’s Dream

by Editor

The Astronomer’s Dream is by Malcolm Sutherland. I can hardly make any sense out of it but I see endless repetition, making of the same mistakes over and over again, Buddhism, the serpent eating its own tail, ancient Mayan predictions and star observations, evolution, looking out equals looking in. That’s all I can make of it. It’s a strange piece of work. I like all the little lines and dashes in the weirdo drawings.

The Visit: Animation in Progress

by Cimaxion

Last night I posted the background image of the snowy landscape for the next shot in the animated movie, The Visit.  If you’re interested, what I’ve done this evening is to take my background landscape and cut it in two pieces along the line of the little hill with the path on it.  The line goes more or less horizontally across the middle of the image.  That makes two images – one with the far away hills, sky and large trees on it, the other with the near ground and path on it.  In Adobe Flash, I place the two pictures on different layers.  The near ground image goes on the top layer so it stays in front of the background hills.  So it looks like a single image again, but now I have my little foreground hill on a different layer than my distant background hills.  Then I place an empty layer in my Flash program right between those two image layers.  This is where I animate the father walking with little Oksana.  So, when I’m finished, it looks as if they are coming up from just behind the little hill close to the viewer.  Click the play button above to watch them.

On top of everything I add a few layers of snow.  To give the illusion of depth, I make the top or near layers of snow move larger dots at higher speed than the lower layers which should look like snow that’s farther away.  I also drew a few pine branches and layered them in just behind some of the snow.  So there’s a quick little shot for our little movie.  I’ll go in and add some shading and light effects tomorrow so that it all looks just a little bit better.

We’re making a fairy tale.  What could be better than that?

The Visit: Animation in Progress

by Cimaxion

MakeTheMovie62

After quite a long break for coffee and ice-cream that’s lasted since November 2007, I am picking up the film right where I left off and this is my image for the evening. It’s a background for a shot of Oksana’s father leading her from home and into the forest. I’ll start working on the two characters tomorrow. They will come up over the little knoll and walk toward us.  It’s amazing how difficult it is to start work on something like this again, but how pleasant the work is once begun.

Here is the latest version of the animation done so far:

The Make the Movie blog has all the posts from the beginning of this little production. You can see the pencil drawings, storyboard film, background paintings, and animation tests. You can also find the original story there.