Process

Sorry for not posting in a while. And I also want to apologize to everybody who has e-mailed me recently and not gotten responses. I am trying to get as much work done on this cartoon as possible. I am pretty frustrated about not having a new episode recently, and to be honest I have gotten rusty, so this cartoon is taking longer to start up than it should.

But I thought I would do a quick post on my process, this is not going to be anything revolutionary to most flash folks out there, but I thought I would share anyway...

Most of the Captain Capitalism cartoons are done using a combination of limited animation techniques and a "puppet" technique. It is sort of similar to how cut out animation is done, or even similar in some ways to doing 3d animation.

Almost everything in the CC cartoons are animated on paper first, and then inked. Here is a setup of one of the hare krishnas from the next cartoon. Why all the hare krishnas lately? Well they are very important to the next cartoon. That and I always have enjoyed drawing hare krishnas for some reason. I don't know if this is inspired from all the old Bloom Countys that I used to read or from running into them often in Houston while growing up.

Usually the drawings start out as blue pencil drawings, that I tend to go over and over and over and over...then I tighten it up with a red pencil...which I go over and over and over. It's a bad habit, that I catch a little grief over, but my pencil drawings come out looking like weird messy 3d art. I then put another sheet on the top pegs of my animation disc and seperate out the different "limited" animation parts in ink (using micron #2s and #8s, and a tradio fountain pen.)

I have gotten into the habit of not penciling out many facial expressions or mouth shapes. I generally make them up as I am inking...which means I end up tossing a bunch of them out, but I kind of like the facial expressions that are made up on the fly.

I try to save paper by covering as much of the 16 field paper with as many parts as I can.

I then vectorize the ink image and bring it into Flash. Voila:

(BTW...the images I have been posting lately don't seem to "blow-up" when you click on them. I am not doing anything different, but if anybody has an idea why this might be happening, please let me know.)

After, all the parts are in Flash, I color them all. I have got a thing for colored lines...because it is so much easier to do in Flash than it was in older animation programs. However, this takes a bit of time, and if I just could let it go, the cartoons would probably come out much faster.

After everything is colored, I break the "puppet" into levels and convert the various parts to symbols, and frames within symbols and make sure everything is lined up. If the character is going to have any close-ups I also go in and tweak the lines a bit, smoothing everything out.

Then the little guy is all ready to animate:

I tried out a wacom cintiq once, and I think I could work on these cartoons in a "paperless" pipeline, if I had one. But Captain Capitalism is going to have to live up to his name a bit more for me to get one for home.