# Help and tips for a school project?



## Dan_Vacant (May 28, 2012)

Okay so I'm sure most of you know it is close to the end of the year so there are projects and test galore. For my World Literature class I have to do a project relating to Macbeth, I chose to do a animated video and I would love to have some tips and pointers for making one (ecpesialy since it could make or break my grade). The material I have is free trials of Adobe flash and Illustrator, and I have the full version of Photo Shop, a friend was going to let me borrow his tablet but then he changed his mind, so I have to use a mouse.
for the audio I have audicity. and I also don't know witch part I should do for the video I was thinking the last scene of the last act but some one else is doing that with a star wars theme. So any tips for it?


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## MFB (May 28, 2012)

How long does it have to be?
Can you actually draw everything that you need to show and have it be understandable?
What are you going to do about dialogue since Flash doesn't have audio?

As an animation student, a 30 second short took me nearly 30-40 hours to fully animate and color using Flash and my Wacom tablet; and that wasn't anything totally cohesive and story-driven, it was a bunch of minor shorts/skits put together.


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## Dan_Vacant (May 28, 2012)

I was going to use audacity and maybe combine the video and audio with windows movie maker. and my friend suggested drawing a face then adding mouth and other facial features that I will move.


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## MFB (May 28, 2012)

It's going to look odd if nothing but the mouth moves since that's not how our muscle/facial features are supposed to work; it's a system, normally eyebrows move with the mouth and that's what creates emotions. If just the mouth moves it'll look like it's Photoshopped and you lose the illusion of reality you're trying to create through animation. 

As a reference for the work ahead of you in animation, this is the film I was talking about before. The opening line sequence alone took about the 3 hours since I forgot how to work in Flash and had to measure each of the lines, set them in place and so forth. Again, it also depends on how long you're going to make it and how smooth you want the transitions to be. Normally a pose is held for two frames, and then it changes so you're doing a LOT of drawing. In this case, I drew on "threes" so I had less but this still reached over 150 drawings, and over 400 frames.

( ( ( o ) ) )


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## Dan_Vacant (May 28, 2012)

It's pretty cool and you put more effort into it then I will because I don't have a tablet. but most of my drawing is cartoony.


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