Fan-animated video - Dark Half

[Knowname]

erg... let me reiterate my statement, sorry if it offended any body, as I forgot to add my appreciation for your video ;p, great accomplishment. I think Bakadeshi and Keeper said it best, love to see more but I just think you went a little over board on the make love not war part lol.

[Zarxrax]

Wow, really awesome stuff there!

A couple nitpicky things:
Your outlines are really thick. If you want it to look more like the actual anime, you might consider making your outlines much thinner next time. Also try to stay away from outlines in the background images, or make them really subtle.
There were lots of spots where things would just STOP. Like you would be panning over a scene, then STOP, then scene change or whatever. You want to try and keep it moving more fluidly, consistently.
Also, if you find it easier to draw by hand, you might want to pick up a scanner and actually use hand drawn animation. Most any cheap scanner would work fine, you don't need one with a high DPI or anything for this type of work.
Lastly, I would recommend you pick up a motion-graphics software, like After Effects. That would help with the animation greatly, allowing you to draw less, and easily do parallax scrolling and stuff.

[Flint the Dwarf]

Well... that was definitely something. I agree with Zarxrax in that you could use thinner lines (especially in a few parts the lines were really thick). But honestly I didn't see much to nitpick about. You have brought fangirlism to a new level, and it really is a good video. I can't help but give it five stars.

[Unlimited Rice]

judging from what these people have posted so far.. I'm goign to wait til everyone here at home is asleep

i don't want my sis knowing that i saw this video.

[Arigatomina]

I feel.....GAY EMOTION RUNNING THROUGH MY BODY! >_>....it was hawt ^_^

- Teco

Thank you. I'm glad to have shared the emotion. ;p
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LOL... that was SOOO wrong on so many levels it was actually humerous

That's what I was hoping for. I like the idea that I can watch the vid and see something entirely serious (if noobishly executed), and still have others view it as a parody. It's an ambidextrous vid.

pretty good fanart btw. I guess the only complaint would be the low frame rate for the animation, but given to make this smooth it would take 1 person forever to draw all those frames without help.... or a studio...

It wasn't just that I didn't have the time, a lot of it was not being able to draw 'intermediary' frames between the main ones to 'fill out' the motion shots. Some of the scenes I barely pictured in my head, so I had trouble imagining the way the characters would move. Really makes me wish I'd bought an advanced copy of my 3d program - it would give me some models to go by as far as 'body motions' go. ;p
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Though I would prefer to see shoujo ai/yuri vid's, I've downloaded this one because of the use of fanart. Well done. I've enjoyed watching it. And I think I have an idea how much effort it needed to do that animation even if with that low frame rate.

Some of the scenes took a day per frame when I first started, and those were shots that didn't even have motion in them. I'd never drawn some of these characters, so getting them 'anime-like' was difficult. That's why I opted to stick with face shots for the Naruto characters, no experience with their 'body shapes.' ^_^;

Since you said you want to use fan made animation in future projects too: Working with low numbers of drawings do the professional animation studios too. But they know better how to cover it. Mostly fluent motion has only every second frame different (at 24fps). And for e.g. waving hair is a repeated loop, many other things too. Also zooms and slides give the impression of animation, but it is only necessary to make one drawing. I assume you made use of the advantages that layers give you for the reuse of already drawn things. But probably not enough. Think of the layers like the cels in anime.

When I was 'redrawing' the anime scenes, I noticed that they repeated at least one frame between each new one. I usually cut that out when I make videos, to speed up the motions. I didn't even think to stick with the animation 'duplicates' when I was doing my own. I was afraid it would drag or seem too slow. Reusing things, though, I caught that when I started adding in backgrounds. I think I used the same two backgrounds for almost all the YYH footage, just one forest with 'moveable' trees. ^_^;; I'm cheap like that, I hate backgrounds.
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I just watched the video and I gotta ask 'Did you draw the animation?' Gosh, I never seen anything like before. Cool video!

I drew parts of it. A lot of it was just copying, recoloring, and editing sections (clothing, backgrounds, situations). I definitely traced as much as I drew. It just wouldn't have looked right to have actual anime footage mixed in, so I redrew everything I used here. There are only two scenes in the vid where I used an undrawn frame - I kept the original backgrounds for two of the YYH frames, just applying some filters so they weren't really noticeable against the 'redrawn' characters. There was no way I could reproduce the backgrounds and I wanted fans of the anime to recognize the scenes as being 'canon' flashbacks.

I'm happy to hear it was new to you - I was shocked when I found people making line-art fan-animated videos (flash vids), so I doubted anyone had really done one with full animation. If there are others, I haven't seen them.

[Zarxrax]

so I doubted anyone had really done one with full animation. If there are others, I haven't seen them.

I've seen a number of original animated videos before, most aren't quite of this level of quality though. I know there are a few posted here on the org. In particular, I remember someone remade the Azumanga opening with Utena characters.

[SuperFusion]

what the hell was that, gay porno? lol..... I thought it was pretty cool, but I think you over did it with all that raping shiz... I found it to be more of the comedy genre then romance and serious... I was pretty much like "wtf.." through the entire video.. the good way.. lol

[Otohiko]

Very neat. Very neat. Certainly the best fan-animation I've seen to date in an otherwise more or less conventional AMV. The complaints as far as the the outlines are definitely valid though - and in general, I think the art would've benefitted from a more "organic" hand-drawn look, whereas here it was pretty obviously all-digital (and thus the outlines, which also didn't help).

Some of the animation/motion/overlay tricks were top-notch. Really shows a good sense of style outside of just static pics.


And... yea, I'll never, ever fully understand the whole 'yaoi pairings' thing, but what the heck

[Arigatomina]

erg... let me reiterate my statement, sorry if it offended any body, as I forgot to add my appreciation for your video ;p, great accomplishment. I think Bakadeshi and Keeper said it best, love to see more but I just think you went a little over board on the make love not war part lol.

No offence was taken, don't worry. ^.~ It's a yaoi vid. I was expecting outright flames for the content. I'm surprised people are being nice about it.

I actually had planned to make this an explicit yaoi hentai vid (not hosted here), so part of the reason I made it was the smut. I backed out halfway through the first section. ^_^;;

I'd like to see a 'normal' video or two done like this, but I wouldn't make one myself (unless it was a rare pairing like Kuwabara and Yukina). I figure there are more than enough people with better skills who make normal vids (het being normal). Half the reason I stuck with this project was because I wanted to see it and didn't think anyone would get around to making it (few yaoi editors here). Sort of a 'if I don't make it no one will' deal.
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Wow, really awesome stuff there!

Thank you! ^__^

A couple nitpicky things:
Your outlines are really thick. If you want it to look more like the actual anime, you might consider making your outlines much thinner next time. Also try to stay away from outlines in the background images, or make them really subtle.

There's a limit to how small the brush goes in PhotoImpression, so I had to raise the resolution of the picture and then resize it down after it was done. I ended up using 960x720 and lowering to 640x480 - made for thick lines. I should have used twice that (so the lines would be 1/3 thinner), but I didn't figure that out till the first section was finished. It's something I'll definitely apply in the future.

There were lots of spots where things would just STOP. Like you would be panning over a scene, then STOP, then scene change or whatever. You want to try and keep it moving more fluidly, consistently.
Also, if you find it easier to draw by hand, you might want to pick up a scanner and actually use hand drawn animation. Most any cheap scanner would work fine, you don't need one with a high DPI or anything for this type of work.

The stopping was actually intentional. ^_^;; The problem was that I did pans in Virtualdub (and zooms, for that matter) and I jumped at the end of some of the pans so the movement jerks to a stop. Shorter intervals and a soft (even) halt would have been better. Live and learn. Or I could break down and get a program that's actually *supposed* to move frames. ^_^;; I couldn't draw the scenes by hand, though. I have a scanner, but if I drew the shots by hand, I'd still have to drawn them once I had them on the computer, to put the 'outlines' an a different layer from the white background of the sketch. Plus, it's a lot easier to hit 'undo' than it is to erase... [I'm lazy.]

Lastly, I would recommend you pick up a motion-graphics software, like After Effects. That would help with the animation greatly, allowing you to draw less, and easily do parallax scrolling and stuff.

I wanted to use Premiere once, just so I could have multiple video tracks for a single 4 second section of a video. I wasted almost two weeks and didn't get anything except an expired trial of the program on my comp. I ended up using Virtualdub. And After Effects is supposed to be 10 times as advanced as Premiere. ^_^;;
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Well... that was definitely something. I agree with Zarxrax in that you could use thinner lines (especially in a few parts the lines were really thick). But honestly I didn't see much to nitpick about. You have brought fangirlism to a new level, and it really is a good video. I can't help but give it five stars.

When I first started doing fanart (practicing to get as 'anime-like' as possible - before I attempted this vid), I didn't use black outlines at all, just darker shades of the colors so the bodies stood out against the backgrounds. I'd really like to go back to that, but it wasn't 'anime' enough. >.<

A new level of fangirlism? Thank you very much!
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judging from what these people have posted so far.. I'm goign to wait til everyone here at home is asleep

i don't want my sis knowing that i saw this video.

Aww...you're no fun. ;p I'd love to see my mom's face if she watched this vid. That would be amusing.

[zest]

butter...fly...2....
@.@