Introduction

This is a blog for the progress on "The Boros," an animated series to air online soon!  Stay tuned for progress and screenshots of the production of this great cartoon.

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PROJECT NEARING COMPLETION

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Here is one last look at some of the process that it takes to animate a cartoon of this magnitude. We see now that all our characters are more or less where they will be in the final, and with the exception of a few backgrounds and a couple specific sequence animations, this is what the complete episode will look like! There are many reasons why something like this may take so long, but besides producing graphics, animation involves a certain amount of programming knowledge.  If you can see in the video at 4:36, "Quiet Mother Fucker in a Hoodie's" left hand in the background is appearing to have a twitch, and it's because the programming of the symbol pack is being told to cycle through all the frames within the pack, as if it were it's own animation on loop.  This is sometimes the desired effect, but in this case, we just want his hand to stay still. The way this happens is when we build characters initially.  We don't always know how our character is goi
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First Character Doll Completely Built

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We've completed our first character!  Vector tracing, while an effective way to bring an existing figure to life in your animation, can be VERY TEDIOUS!  Luckily, I'm a professional. Progress Screen Shots: Creating the head of any character doll can be very trying, because this is where people will be looking the most when watching your character move and talk.  Many different layers, even though they look so simple!  If the head needs to blink, an animator has to be able to do that independently from the mouth and eye-brow layers, unless they want to work twice as hard and redraw the face for every movement... Luckily, that's not what we're doing here today, but I actually do enjoy some frame-by-frame motions, as well! The torso links everything together, and therefore deserves it's own layer, as well. This is where most characters show you their personality, either through apparel or maybe some sort of subliminal idea, i.e. maybe instead of a tie, thi
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Character Map Properly Proportioned, 1 Character Left!

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Here we can see now that our main character Solomon is the correct proportion to the other characters in the episode, and so now any zooming we do with the symbols will maintain the consistent integrity throughout the different models, as opposed to distracting your eye with obvious pixelation and graphic edits that make an animation "clunky" when we obviously want something more seamless. Believe it or not, I had to resize each layer a second time for every symbol, which is what took so long. I literally got stuck all day on resizing vectors, which is why it's so important to have a good character proportion chart to work off of FIRST! I've put this in my notes for next time... Stay tuned, I've got one more character (this time I'm going to proportion the screenshot to match the approximate size of the character sheet and do it that way, I'm certain it will save me time) and then we are DONE BUILDING CHARACTERS! NEXT STEP: Story Bo
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