Space Barbarian Opening

My Space Barbarian opening! It's been up over the Hoot'Nanny Youtube channel for a while. Decided to post it here as well. This would count as my first proper flash animation. Yes, those sound effects you hear are classic Hanna-Barbera sounds. Royalty free sound effects, at that! Well sorta. Boy I got plenty more legal mumbo jumbo knowledge while I was finding suitable sounds.

I can't tell you how many classic cartoon openings I watched while I was huting down proper music for the theme. The theme is also royalty free music. The drums for the title card is an original composition. Not much too it, but I think I did alright for someone without musical ability. 

Til next time, toonsters!

Dig That Funky Pattern

If you know of Cartoon Network's Chowder, then you know one of the show's trademarks are the funky animated patterns on the characters.

I'd been trying to think up how in the world they're able to pull that off. Actually lots of people are and it's been quite tricky trying to track down any sort of specific information.

One day after watching an episode of Chowder I got to thinking about how I might be able to pull off an animated pattern like in Chowder. Before you run to Flash, don't. Animating this is beyond Flash's capabilities. I had tried it a while back with masks but it just doesn't work.

I did throw the scene and "Soup" together in Flash and I made a "background" pattern with the Deco Tool. 

For Soup all I did was make sure the parts of his costume that was getting the pattern were a solid bright green. A color that in no way was going to end up in the scene. 

I then set about animating Soup's walk and him going back and forth. 

Once I had a decent enough loop animated in Flash, I then took the whole set up into Adobe After Effects. As that was one way I figured they could pull off those animated patterns.

So once I had everything imported into After Effects I simply set about applying a chroma/color keying effect. Also known as "green screen".

As you can see, it worked. However as far as my experience level goes, After Effects is only good for one pattern. Since you set the pattern on a layer below your animation.

If you've never worked with After Effects before it works with a layered timeline similar to Flash, but way more complex.

You could also likely pull this off with Adobe Premier, maybe. The results would be the same, good for one pattern.

So it seems that for now the secret behind those animated patterns in Chowder will remain a mystery. Unless of course there's some technique you can use to tying specific color key colors to specific patterns, in After Effects or Premier. There very well could be, but I've not stumbled across them yet.

Til next time, toonsters! 

Change is Nigh-ish

So I've been deciding how to go about better building a presence for Hoot'Nanny Productions. Though, I must say I have managed to generate a couple of bucks via ads between here and my website. So I'm still weighing the options of going the website/blog route.

I've been working on setting up Cartoon Syndicate It's far from finished but it's coming together and it's letting me see the potential I have for Hoot'Nanny Productions. As my site is right now I must always wrestle with the restrictions of my current hosting plan's templates. I would have a bit more design freedom with the website/blog combo with the price of getting used to Wordpress, but that is a bit of net design experience I can apply to other things in the future.

I'm also learning the ins and outs of web promotion/marketing to better my chances of generating passive income for additional funding and exsposure for my toons. As such in a bit of further unrelated news I've launched PanzerBanana.com. To have a general non-cartoon site/blog so my my official cartoon sites won't be cluttered with too many unrelated topics. Just follow the link for the full story.

Til next time, toonheads!