So you have a great story and want to tell it.  You want to make an Anime or Anime?  Or would you rather make a Manga?  Well….why not combine the two in a visual novel.

I see a few advantages to this.  If you are not the best artist you could still hire someone to make some of the characters for you thus reducing the cost to make and yet you would still be able to tell your entire story with fewer drawings.

Here are some of the top Visual Novels

Here is a free software to help you make your own visual novel.

Here is a video breaking down a rig for Puppet Animation.  Personally I’m okay with it if it is creative and good.  I guess because I come from the old flash days when you had to do things differently because there was no streaming at the time.  Tween animation helped keep file sizes down.    Because of this I’m okay with this type of animation if done correctly.

Here is a tutorial breaking down a rig.

Here are examples of good old fashioned tweening.  Funny thing is this has become really popular over the years even in mainstream work.

Anime is quite different from its counterpart in America.  For example American animation usually uses 24 FPS for the entire animation.  Avatar: The Last Airbender is an example of that.  It has very fluid and consistent animation throughout the series.  They also had a 2 million dollar budget compared to a usual 200-300,000 per Episode budget of an anime series if that.   I’ve seen much lower.

With such low budgets there is a need to take some short cuts to animation while still making it look good enough to watch and in most cases still look beautiful.

A few years back I found this great cheat sheet breakdown over at Celshader.com.  I love that site.  Check out these awesome anime cheats that you could use in your next video.

Here are some essentials, some check boxes and some tricks to keeping your anime awesome but your animation time lower.

General Tips


Essentials (present throughout the entire animation. DO NOT skimp on these)

  • Story — the foundation of your animation. If this fails, it all falls apart.
  • Direction — a good director can wring more out of less, in my opinion.
  • Storyboards — because good storyboards save you $$$.
  • Art Direction — present throughout the entire piece.
  • Character Designs — make those held cels works of art.

Next Level (try to make these as high-quality as possible)

  • Color Design
  • Voice Acting — carrying the weight of the character’s emotions.
  • Music — film-quality music lends a cinematic feel to the animation.
  • Sound FX
  • Backgrounds — the more detail, the more “expensive” it looks.

Scene Level (reducing the amount of total character animation work)

  • Convey Complex Actions Off-Screen — using editing and sound FX
  • Reduce the Number of Characters On-Screen
  • Reduce the Amount of Character Interaction
  • Intercut Complex Character Animation with Simpler Shots

Shot Level (aka: “If It Moves, It Can’t Possibly Be A Comics Panel!”)

  • Camera Moves
  • Rack Focus
  • Background Animation — ’cause you got to animate something
  • Life Cycles — minor animations that dress up a “held cel.”
  • Light FX — easier than character animation
  • Specular Animation
  • Cutting Animation with Held Cels — stretching your animation dollar.
  • Hide-the-Mouth — to cut down on the amount of lip-synch work
  • Hide-the-Feet — eliminate “foot slide” with creative cropping
  • Held Cels

Frame Level

  • Strong Poses and Facial Expressions
  • High Illustration Quality — don’t let it look “cheap.”
  • Glow — a relatively inexpensive enhancement.

 

 

 

 

Watching this video reminds me of the time I started using Flash and that Ifinally had the ability to do what I always wanted to do and that was make animation.

Looks like I was not the only out there.  Enjoy this little documentary about the Rise of Animation.

Here is part 1 by the way!