GinjaNinja, or Rea’s channel is a gateway into lots of cool cartoons, so you better
be prepared to get sucked into something if you start watching her animations.
Warrior Cats, Steven Universe, Miraculous Ladybug, My Little Pony, Pokemon, Undertale
- it’s all there!
Considering all of the fandoms Rea has touched, it’s not surprising that I heard about Amino
from her first.
Amino is a phone app for fans of just about anything, and there’s a Multi Animator Project
group, which you may like if you’re looking for a place to get involved in animation MAPs
and animation memes.
This is my first time using Amino so…
I’m downloading the MAP Amino and here we go.
And we’re in!
It’s a mass of color.
I expected to be overwhelmed but I actually figured out how to use the app right away.
It’s really well organized, and gets even better depending on who is the leader of each
community.
The Night In the Woods curator gets top stars - even the categories have custom names.
In each group you can chat, make quizzes and polls, post art, and blog.
Oh no, the app is stuck.
Oh my gosh.
I can’t get out of the facial recognition avatar.
AAAAHHHH
Turns out there’s a main Amino App that you may need to get into other groups, so
I downloaded that too and started poking around.
I like all of this stuff.
Oh no I really AM A NERD!
If you’re a hobby artist yourself, there are some great art communities on Amino.
I’ll probably talk about this in Season Three at some point, but artists tend to band
together in groups and get better together, so it’s nice to interact with others at
a similar skill level.
So that’s the MAP amino, and the reason I mention it is because much of Rea’s work
has been Multi Animator Project and animation meme focused: lots of little short few-second
long animations packed with poppy colors and minimalist but cute backgrounds, although
this year I get the sense that has changed and she’s going to be doing new things.
The most recognizable aspect of Rea’s Adobe Flash animation style are the hairline outlines
that are an even thickness throughout.
Fills are sometimes shaded and sometimes not, but those outlines stay true!
Of course there are other art styles she experiments with, but this is the go-to you’ll see the
most.
She experiments with animation techniques as much as art styles, actually.
Sometimes it’s puppetry and sometimes it’s original drawings and sometimes it’s not
really animation at all.
I guess I’ll call it still frame animation?
Framination?
Framination.
Hm.
No.
I don’t know if I like that.
It’s the same as whatever Scribble Kibble is “animated” in.
There isn’t an official term for this, but given how popular it is on YouTube we need
to think of something!
I’m going to call it still frame for now.
Mermaids are Jerks is the biggest original animation in Rea’s portfolio.
There’s a making of video that I linked below that shows how Rea animates with the
thin outlines.
In this case she starts with a storyboard that uses regular thick sketch lines, and
then draws on top of that with the thin lines to create keyframes.
Once she has keyframes, the rest of the animation is putting down the middle position poses
and then drawing all of the connecting inbetween frames.
The unfortunate thing about animating underwater like this is it requires a lot of original
drawings, especially with the mermaid’s hair.
Under water, hair has practically infinite follow-through.
What that means is if someone turns their head, their hair keeps moving afterwards forever.
You can tell Rea got tired of dealing with it past the opening and the hair ends up being
still.
As for the future, lately Rea’s been doing a lot of commission animation for music videos
on YouTube channels like The Living Tombstone, Jordan Sweeto, and jacksfilms.
Now the interesting thing about these animations is they are much more heavily special effects-dosed
than the cartoons on her own channel.
I’m not sure if she’s been doing this herself, or if it’s the work of somebody
else who does the video production on all of these animations.
Hmm.
Yeah.
The effects are video production work.
Rea does the animation - you can see it cleanly and unedited at this point in the Mario video
- and then video production takes those animations, puts background layers in, does all the special
effects, does all of the imitation light and shadows on top of the 2D characters, and adds
camera movements.
As always, you can find all of the cartoons I talked about below.
Here’s some of the fan art you’ve sent in.
Special thanks to the Scribble Kibble show sponsors Trevor and Nitsua, and everyone else
who is keeping the show and original animations going through Patreon.