The Morning After

Head a bit like soup this morning. I finished the new animation very late last night and it’s currently rendering in the background. In about half an hour, I’ll uploaded it to Youtube and then post it here.

I’d given myself five days to finish the animation. In the end, it took an exhausting nine. At least four of those were down to the mistakes I made along the way learning to animate and work across three quite complicated software packages. I learned so many lessons, such as always having a solid script when you begin. Next time, I’ll also spend plenty of time rigging the puppets, which make life so much easier than having to fix things later on. Each shot in the animation can take up to ten minutes to render, so to make a mistake, as I did repeatedly, makes the process so much slower.

As for the acting, the less said about that the better. Frankly, I'm just embarrassed by how poor it is. When I set out to create these animations, I wanted to aim for the quality of the brilliant Morten Morland, who works for The Times. I think I now know why he gets professional voice actors in to work on his cartoons. Listening to it, I realise that I sound worryingly like John Shuttleworth.

In the end, the music worked out well. The Creative Commons websites provided what I needed and I’m delighted with the result. The music I now have is substantially stronger than the copyrighted music I was using whilst working on it. So, thanks for the suggestions and help. Next time, I’ll have the right music selected from the outset.

It’s now all a matter of what I do next. I finished writing a novel a few weeks ago and it seems like bad form to just allow it to sit on my desk. The problem is that no bugger seems to want to read it. Perhaps I’ll go back and redraft it. Perhaps I’ll do another cartoon. Perhaps I’ll just sit and think up a few new cartoons. Perhaps I’ll go and hide and wait for the usual internet trolls to tell me that I’ve just produced the unfunniest thing they’ve ever seen.

No cartoon today but animation to follow...