Hell, I wish it was that easy.

But animation is a progression, it’s not just getting something from point A to point B, it has to consider time as well.  And that’s something that seems to get lost.

Many of my students seem to see time as an intangible.  It’s something that we exist in, but can’t manipulate.  Of course, this may seem true in most instances, but I know I have the power to make time slow down, in a very real sense, when I get to the lectures about coding (if/else anyone?).  So if time is a progression, and we can measure it with clocks (or cell phones), why can’t we manipulate it?  Odd question I’ve always wondered, every other dimension we can go in any direction, but time leaves us stuck going forwards (I’m guessing we can take rights and lefts, but no steps back).

In animation, we get to break that rule – to a degree.  Once we place our object to animate, be it animal, vegetable or mineral at a point in time, we can in fact revisit that time and location and alter it to fit our needs better.  In fact, with Flash I constantly go backwards and forwards to shape my animation’s outcomes to my needs.  Sounds almost godlike!

Then there’s the other bit that deals with time – just like all of us weren’t all introduced into each other’s lives at the very beginning, we don’t have to have our characters all sitting around at the beginning, waiting to enter from stage left like actors in a play.

So taking these observations in mind, we begin to see that animation has rules that need to be met and pushed. We can introduce our characters one by one, change when they meet, and under what circumstances. These are all parts of telling a story, deciding how things conceptually interact. But what about the bit when we just need something to move across the room? Here we get to see time at its most basic. Now we have train A leaving the station and heading to station B 20 miles away. How long will it take?

Well, how fast is it going? With animation we measure time the way we measure distance, with a yardstick – we break down seconds into smaller divisions called frames (no milliseconds yet!).

———————- break —————————

Hell, I don’t know where I was going with this anymore.  My site got hacked and taken down for a day.  Sitting at home now, with a cat purring on my lap, Janis Joplin on the radio, and a need to go make dinner soon.

So that’s why I showed this to my class last night.  I started it out by asking, “Who here has seen Monty Python stuff before?”  A few hands went up.  One girl asked, “is that like an anaconda or something?” Another said, “I’ve heard of ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ but I’ve never seen it.”  The one student who actually is older than me rolled his eyes (I was too, in case you’re wondering).  Another student said, he’d only seen it because his girlfriend insisted he watch it (hope for the younger generation I guess!).

Still – I played this, there was glorious silence for 15 minutes, interjected by me yelling out things like, “we can do that with Photoshop now!” and “that’s basically motion tweening!” By end of class, I saw one girl redoing her project using black and white pictures cut out and put into Flash – and a few mentioned they were going to look for more Monty Python stuff over the weekend.

There’s a lot to keep track in this game idea, and so, just like I tell the students, this isn’t something where you throw everything into a pot and let it simmer — you have to prep first.  Thing is, I don’t know what all the ingredients are.

So what do you do if you don’t know where to start?  Turn on Flash and stare blankly at the screen? Nope.  I’m going back to the basics.  I have my pages and pages of notes.  I have vague ideas about levels and mini-games in the game.  I’m going to grab pencil and paper.  When I can’t draw out Evil Onion backgrounds and imagery any more, I’ll switch over to this.  When I’m tired of trying to figure out how to get lots of little bits and pieces to interact, I’ll go back to the onion.

I think that when I’m ready, what I have to do is come up with the game dynamics, fake some animation (little blocks instead of fully fleshed out characters) and get them to move and behave how they have to.  Once that works, I’ll go back and make clean animations.  This is what usually kills me.  I jump straight to the icing, forgetting the cake underneath.  Let’s see if I can be any better this time around.

I’m still working on the new onion story, trying to come up with some new interesting backgrounds – right now, I’m playing with poster ideas, using various sketch software on the iPad to try and come up with something.  Hell, I even played with 123D Sculpt to try and make a 3D onion…. that’s not coming out as well as I had hoped.  If only I could just sculpt him in real clay, then scan him in.  Because, you know, I have access to all that kind of equipment … or even clay. For now, here he is, squashing a flower.

One thing that keeps coming up (thanks in part to Theresa bringing it up on occasion) is, what other kinds of rude things will the evil onion do.  She wants him giving the finger.  What finger?  Do I have to give him arms first?!  Will he need legs too?  Will he end up looking like Chairface Chippendale, except an onion and not a chair?  This is a slippery slope, innit?

Still, today is the first night of class, and I’m going to see where this new batch takes me. Teaching is always an odd thing to me, since I’m working off topics that are very familiar to me, I don’t really feel like I’m teaching as much as I’m just explaining the obvious (yes, I know, obvious to me), but I generally feel that this stuff should be fairly easy to pick up once they give it a chance, and I should be there to just elaborate on the simplicity (or complexity) of the general ideas.

This is my second quarter teaching Flash, and I think it’s going to help me get to the ball rolling faster on the onion.  I think I’ll be taking the iPad and sketching during lab time a lot this quarter.

Fade in, our onion, now an elder statesman in his oniony community, his comfortable life ensured by his misdeeds throughout the years. No.  That won’t work.  Maybe he’s like other cartoon characters, never aging?

Fade in, the onion sits at a desk. There are posters on the wall behind him, calling for donations, onions smile down from these posters.  He’s working for some kind of charity… but what kind?

More later. I think I have the beginnings of a new cartoon finally…

Still, I was still learning to use Flash, and people were still learning to use “Google” as a verb, so it wasn’t like I had all the resources of the world at my grasp. Not yet anyway. Today, things are a little bit better. The vast resources of the web are easier to find, and most is on YouTube, narrated by 13 year olds. This coincidentally, is how I modified my Nerf Maverick, which I’m apparently no longer allowed to use in night class to shoot college students…

Where was I? Oh, the onion. I’m going to rebuild him. Ground up, which I suppose is how onions go normally. Flash apparently can rotate in 3D, but really, it’s rotating a 2D object in all it’s flattened glory in a 3D space. Apparently I’m going to have to find a new way, and that way may be Photoshop, but who knows. I’ll play with that, and maybe post an image of whatever bit of the onion I’m currently constructing.

So, here are two cartoons I made somewhere way back in the foggy days of 2001: On the Road and At Home.

By the way, I have no idea why I gave him fangs. I am however still certain that onions make lousy neighbors.