How many times have you seen a comic strip and thought, "This would look great in animation"? How many of you did it with An Infinitesimally Breif History of the World? Well, I have; and I was saying to my self, why don't we just do it? If all works out, it'll be probably the most awesome tribute to Griffin's genious yet!
But of course, an animation project is not like a drawing project. It is something much bigger and complex. The fact is, I need all the help I can get. And, of course, the more people that can give feedback, the better.
I was thinking of animating Housepets of Ancient Egypt for three reasons:
- It's in prose, which means that the people on the project have some artistic freedom (if the drawing doesn't come out right, it doesn't matter)
- It's one of the shortest of Rick's prose stories (meaning we might be able to finish before the holiday break is over)
- It doesn't require that many scene changes or character entrance/exits (again, having less things to make, makes it more likely we'll actually finish)
What we need to make this happen:
- Character designers: These people get to decide what the characters' appearance will be, how old they are, how buffed-up they are (or aren't), what they should wear (if anything), and how they look from different angles (frontal, ¼, ¾, profile).
- Vector artists: When the character designer can't draw on a computer or doesn't own a vector-graphics program, an extra person is required to convert these images to vector graphics, which is what Flash can animate best
- Storyboarders: Since we already have the script, the main job of the storyboarders is to choose the camera angles within which the animators will have to work, and draw thumbnails of this (regardless of however badly they may draw)
- Animators: These are the people that set the key frames for Flash to do the inbetweening. The animators basically put the images given to them by the vector artists into all the poses that they need to move into to. Again, done right, they should be able to do it even if they don't actually have Flash (somemone who does have it pastes these keyframes into Flash and shows them what it looks like)
- Voice actors: (self-explanatory)
- Sabrina, the narrator
- The scribe or teacher
- Sekhmenotep ("So it’s your ghost then?")
- Other lion
- Lions in the background
- Folley artists: The folley artists are in charge of the sound effects and the background noises (an animation of a chalkboard falling doesn't sound like a chalkboard falling unless someone adds the sound in) . They need to be able to find a usable sound file, or create something "close enough", for every sound needed
- Directors: The directors have to be able to visualize what the scene will look like, and communicate this to the animators and the voice-actors so that they do it right. They can tell them to modify any part if they don't find the result agreeable.
- Background artists: (again, self-explanatory)
I'll act as producer, which means "putting this into animation was my idea, so I get to sort out any arguments". It also means that if there's something nobody can do, I have to either find someone to do it, or do it myself. (Unfortunately, if it turns out I need to do things myself, I'm kind of busy until mid-December). Hopefully, Rick will allow us to ask him any questions we may have, which I think would put him in the role of Creative Advisor.
Well, that's about it. Who wants to participate?
(Braces self for avalanche of posters wanting to animate anything but that)
