The animation was made entirely using Microsoft Paint. This was a very tedious process, and was not super enjoyable. I like animating, but Paint does not have a lot of features and caused a lot of frustration at times. I used Paint because that was what I had been using for the first chapter, which I created in high school. The first chapter is embedded below this paragraph. I think there is definitely a noticeable increase in quality between the first and second chapters. The second chapter had better quality frames, as well as having far more motion. The scenes of flying through the mountains took the longest to make, and were the most tedious, due to having to continuously redraw the mountain sides. I was very happy once I finished that portion, the rest was much more enjoyable in comparison.
In the future I think I would use Gimp to draw the animations, since it has support for layers, which would allow me to erase and change the foreground without messing up the background. This was my main frustration with Paint, since it took a long time to fix the backgrounds after I would move/redraw objects in the foreground. I think the only reason I stuck with Paint through the whole process was out of familiarity and consistency. Layer capabilities would definitely allow me to work faster.
I used Windows Movie Maker to arrange all the frames and create the animation without sounds. I then used Blender and used the video editor to add sounds, since it allows you to use multiple channels and has some pretty great features. Blender is a very powerful program, plus it's free. I have also created a short 3D animation with it in the past, and I hope to make more in the future. I wasn't even aware that it had a video editor, but I'm very happy that I learned that before working on the sound effects for this video. Although it is a pretty complicated program when you are just starting out, you get used to it over time and it has a lot of amazing capabilities. The video editor built into Blender is also probably the easiest part of it to use, and I picked it up pretty quickly.
I searched online for the majority of the sound effects, and found quite a few good effects on royalty free sites. The sources are listed in the video description. I was lucky to find a lot of sounds that fit pretty much perfectly with what I had in my mind. The best match was the sound I managed to find for the alien's gun firing and exploding. I'm very happy with how the sounds turned out overall.
The opening title and closing credits were made using Gimp. Gimp has a lot of great capabilities, and it worked very nicely for creating a decent looking title. I watched a tutorial and modified the result until it looked pretty nice. I also threw in a couple Monty Python and the Holy Grail references in the end credits if you manage to catch that.
I have a whole short series planned out for these videos, and I'd like to get to work on them eventually. They are very time consuming though, so it may be some time before I manage to complete the next video. I also have several other projects I'd like to work on in my limited free time, including finishing a Java/GWT application and possibly an Android app, and remaking the Chapter One video as a 3D animation in Blender, as well as working on additional 3D HeroClix map boards. If you're curious about these projects check out the other posts on this blog. Due to all of these projects, it would be nice if I could have an animation team for my videos. I do enjoy animating, but for me I think I get the most enjoyment out of telling the story and editing. That would be the ideal situation, but it's very wishful thinking since it wouldn't be a paying gig. But a guy can dream right?
Well thanks for reading this and watching my video! Let me know what you think of it and if you have any suggestions for improvement, I'm always grateful for constructive criticism. If you're interested in the projects I'm working on stay tuned/subscribe to this blog, I'll keep posting here when I make progress on my projects.
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