Mobile Animation for Comics

We wake up most mornings listening to the new on NPR (National Public Radio). This morning, after a story on Comic-con (the huge annual comic book convention), there was a piece on the boom in “mobile animation” in Japan. Japan is a big market for comic books (”manga”), as well as a big market for mobile phones and new trends in mobile media. The story indicated that distributing comics through mobile phones had become The Next Big Thing over there. Some advancements include touch-interface phones such as the iPhone, which allows a tactile turning-the-page experience. But also of interest is animating the comics for delivery over cell phones and other mobile players.

If you’re looking for new niches or market opportunities, it may be time to brush up on the subjects of converting drawn art to vectors (time to crack open that copy of Adobe Illustrator which came free with your After Effects or Photoshop bundle), creating vector artwork (especially comics), and - most important of all - animating that artwork. This last skill is what can set you, a motion graphics artist, apart from other more conventional illustrators in the field, or make yourself an important partner for them. Adobe Flash is obviously the big dog in this field, but there are also a couple of other solutions out there worth exploring, such as Anime Studio Pro which allows you to add “bones” to vector or even hand-drawn artwork, and the Puppet Tools in Adobe After Effects CS3 and later.

By the way, another news item this morning concerned a new search engine called Cuil ("an old Irish word for knowledge") started by a bunch of ex-Googlites. A search for “mobile animation” on Cuil returned a subjectively more useful result (arranged in a far more visually useful fashion) than a standard Google search. Keep an eye on them.

3-D Objects in Photoshop Part 2 - Photoshop for Video #86

Instructor Richard Harrington how to work with 3-D objects in Photoshop CS3. Part 2 of 2.

3-D Objects in Photoshop Part 1 - Photoshop for Video #85

Instructor Richard Harrington how to work with 3-D objects in Photoshop CS3. Part 1 of 2.

Avoid Import Blues for After Effects

It’s very common to use Photoshop and Illustrator to prepare content for import into Adobe After Effects.  Here are some practical tips to avoid problems when merging the software.
Import Tips

• Double-Click in the AE Project Window
• Shift-Click Multiple Items
• Organize in Folder and Option+Drag (Alt+Drag) from Desktop
• Keep file names less than 27 characters long

Focus On Design

One of our plans for this blog going forward is to not only cover gear, techniques, and business issues, but also motion graphics artists and their art. If you’ve done a cool project recently, and are willing to share inside information on the design as well as how you executed those design challenges, please get in touch with us so that we can potentially cover you here - send email to either one of our first names at cybmotion.com.

In that vein, we thought it would be fun to dust off an extensive article we wrote back in 1999 (the previous century!) that covered designers and design trends at the 1999 BDA Conference. In 1999, grunge type treatments were still all the rage (think “Seven"); it’s fun to look back now and see what from those designs still looks fresh and relevant, and which ones might not have survived the test of time.

Click here to read the main article, which discussed several important design trends including typography, 2D vs. 3D, and the emergence of the desktop-based studio which we now take for granted.

Click here to read a companion article which focused on nine studios, and recent projects they had executed back then (lots of eye candy!).

On Artbeats.com: Article on Mixing Audio

As some of you know, both of us originally came from the music industry. Chris in particular still composes music and edits dialog for some of CyberMotion’s clients.

Every month, we write a Tips N Tricks article for our friends at Artbeats.com. This month we wrote about how mix audio effectively to ensure the listener can hear the dialog without becoming distracted by the music or sound effects. There’s only a few simple rules you need to learn to make a huge improvement in the quality of your soundtracks. Remember: Bad audio can really distract from good video!

Click here to download a PDF of “Clearly Mixed” from Artbeats.com. (This is an update of our classic 1995 article on mixing, On The Level.)

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