Self Centaured - A short animated film

Hey. I sort of disappeared from these forums for a while didn't I? Then I came back... then I vanished again.

I've been busy while I've been away though, for instance I finished a Uni course on Animation which involved teaming up with two coursemates to make this film:

We wanted to buck a few of the trends of student animation and do something with dialogue and jokes and that rather than flashy showreel stuff (though it must be said Anna's character animation is pretty damn lovely). We also made made it seven minutes long, which is a record for our young course.

The group consisted of me, John Bowen and Anna Pabian.
We wrote the story together.
John did all the backgrounds and music (and animated 'You cowards!')
Anna animated the bits that look good.
I animated the bits that look insane.
The voice of Tambourine Man was a local actor, novelist and youth theatre organizer called [url=http://audioboo.fm/Martynhornerglister]Martyn Horner-Glister[/url] and he is probably the best discovery since electricity. Ya'll should get in touch with him if you ever need a funny actor with an unfathomably soothing voice.
I am proud of all of us.

Do this John Bowen to sort you're links out Eggie.

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I liked this reminded me of those weirdo 80s cartoons you used to get on channel 4.

How long did it take to produce?

I'm only about half way through and it looks great, but it's not that funny. Look forward to seeing more of your work though.

Quote: Gavin @ July 18 2011, 10:10 PM BST

How long did it take to produce?

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About nine months, it was the only project in our third year. I can't quite remember how much of that time was writing, storyboarding, eating ice cream etc but it was a sizeable chunk.

Quote: Nil Putters @ July 18 2011, 9:27 PM BST

I'm only about half way through and it looks great, but it's not that funny.

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Two things: 1) There's some black at the end so you're further along than you think, and 2) please keep watching, we saved the best 'til last

A few issues but very good overall. Particularly liked the music. Good luck with making a career of it.

The presentation was good, but the writing was lacking I'd say, but since you're animators etc and not writers, then that's ok.

Quote: Eggie @ July 18 2011, 11:23 PM BST

About nine months, it was the only project in our third year. I can't quite remember how much of that time was writing, storyboarding, eating ice cream etc but it was a sizeable chunk.

View original

Ok cool. What software did you use to make it? Lots of questions right?

I'm impressed btw the visual stuff is nice lil bit rough around edges but still very nice.

I used flash, Anna used Toon Boom, John created his backgrounds with combinations of photoshop and good ol' pencil and paper.

We composited in After Effects which is super-handy because you can import .swf files and scale them up to any resolution with 'continuous rasterisation' (we always intended to present the film in HD.

Then we edited the shots together in Final Cut, which we could have done a lot better. Then our sound design guy delivered his first pass late meaning we had to make a lot of revisions ourselves in Soundtrack Pro (unfortunately he was using Protools so we had no good way of fine-tuning his work and everything there went a bit askew too, I take full responsibility for Centaur's awful scream at the end)

For making our final export we exported the Final Cut file as an uncompressed video and put that back into After Effects so we could control the video settings, and it's about then the University computer completely ran out of space sending us into a spiral of panic and alcoholism.

And that pretty much brings us to today.

You guys working on anything else? have another work?

That's a good solid suite of software.

Dont know how I missed this first time round but I thought it was very good