My Webseries

Hi,
I’ve been (slowly) teaching myself Toon Boom.
I’d love you to check out my stuff.
http://www.DumperFilms.com
Thanx,
Justin

That was fairly good to watch. I didn’t get bored and watched it to the end. However the big punch line joke (won’t spoil it for those who haven’t watched) I felt needed a lot of work.

Hey there Justin,

That was pretty good overall. The story had some funny moments and it was entertaining enough to see where you were going with it. I really enjoyed the transition between the slow motion kick off the roof to falling past all the windows. Props for the amount of content you generated. It’s obvious that you put some effort into what you’ve done. How long did this take you to make if I may ask?

From a shot and design viewpoint I noticed some issues. I know you mentioned that you made this while still learning animate so it was probably more of a test than a finished product. If that’s the case then cool but here are some suggestions:

Art Style: Art is like food and so subjective that there is no right or wrong way to do anything. People will have their individual tastes and opinions, but there is such a thing as useful generalization. It looks like you took a minimalist approach with your art direction. The characters were simply drawn and colored with a single tone, which is fine. However, I think they would have more appeal if you use at least two tones to give them some depth (base color and shadow) or stylized the design even more as opposed to edging towards realism. You gave the Jabba character some shading but the others had only a few parts with color gradients. It felt like the characters needed more visual interest.

Example: the Simpsons is drawn with a very cartoony style and colored only with single tones. Even though the characters are very stylized and simple they are done with slick sweeping line quality and solid volumes that give them a professional looking polish and appeal.

Hands: Hands are tough to draw at first and the muscle guys hands are pretty rough. Consider simplifying them. You don’t have to draw each finger just because you know it’s supposed to be there. Think about drawing multiple fingers together as a larger mass to suggest a whole hand. You can see this trick being used in comics or animation at times. Don’t think mitten, think two or three fingers stuck together.

Image planes: In the opening scene with the camera move sweeping over the terminator robots they were all the same size and value. The illusion of depth would have been more effective if you resized some of them so that they were progressively smaller as they neared the background.

Line of action: in the first scene with the robot slapping Arnold there are some problems with line of action. In the medium shot you begin with the terminator on the left side of the screen but when you cut to the close up he is on the right side. The following link is to a tutorial defining line of action and why it isn’t a good idea to break it during certain scenes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNOT9iHDSXU

There are plenty of books on cinematography and shot design out there or you can just google about it and find even more info. However, I’m usually a video person when it comes to tutorials and the link explained the basics idea of line of action quite well.

Transitions: You use a lot of panning and zooming in your scenes as opposed to hard cuts to move from shot to shot. Because they are often used in film as a, “reveal” technique it almost felt like the scene was slowing down and throwing off your timing. That worked great for the falling scene but not so much during the dialogue in the gym. It was a bit distracting to keep pulling in, out and across. Consider setting up your shots and making hard cuts during the dialogue instead of the camera moves. May I ask what you put your scenes together with?

Animation: I know you were using a cut out animation style and there wasn’t much movement. It was more like a moving comic except for the dialogue and the use of phonemes for the mouth shapes. However, the timing was a bit off in places and the animation looked too floaty and or slow.

Example: you can almost count the frames when you see the characters eyes move or when he raises and lowers the clipboard. In real life people’s eyes shift so fast from point to point that it’s practically instantaneous.
Consider speeding up some of these movements by using a hold until only a few frames before they need to move. I’m having a brain fart trying to come up with an Animate term for this but I believe it’s as simple as adding frames up to a certain point and then creating the actual movement or animation with fewer frames near the end… as opposed to using as many as you did.

Again, great start with the software. It takes guts to put your art out there like this so hats off to you. Good luck with the series.