Hola enemigos!
Para español, haga clic en la descripción.
Everyone else, onward with the video and pretend that didn't happen.
You’ve stumbled right into another episode of Scribble Kibble, a weekly show about animation
made by an animator.
This time I want to go back and revisit the animations I watched when I had no idea it
was possible for a normal person (yeah okay) like me to make videos.
This is nostalgic for me.
It’s… when you go back and you look at something that inspired you, and you look
at what you can do today and you think, "Wow.
I could make that now."
It’s… makes it not as special as it used to be.
Yeesh.
Let’s not go there.
Instead, let’s go to CCC.
Triple C. Should I call it triple C?
The city of opportunities.
The stark raving mad world created by Vinnie Veritas.
I’ll give you a foothold in CCC.
Triple C?
I don't...
let's go with CCC.
Triple C sounds weird.
Before I cut you loose.
I'll give you a foothold in it.
Yeah, whatever!
I'll help you figure the world out.
So every character in the background of Vinnie’s comics and animations is different.
A lot of them have weird markings, odd weapons, unusual hair, cool accessories, unique powers
- because CCC is a city made up of all of Vinnie’s ideas and abandoned concepts thrown
together in one place.
Imagine a city where all the main characters from everything everywhere ever go.
That's basically what it's like.
I actually can’t decide which animation to have you watch, so let’s do it this way.
The one I’m going to talk about is Gravitaxis...
BUT these are my other picks.
Hoy te amo is a story about a treasure hunter.
Papalote is a funny sequence about a guy who flies a kite.
And Rush 2 is an action-packed video that shows everyday life in CCC.
So pick what you feel like watching and I'll see you in a second.
Well, not a second.
If it were a second that would be a very short animation.
Yeah, Vinnie's animations are actually pretty long.
It's... it's really impressive.
[laughs]
Ten years ago this was the top crop of internet animation.
There were a lot less people making internet cartoons, and it was harder to find them because
there weren’t many places that collected videos.
Vinnie couldn’t even upload his first cartoons to YouTube because it didn’t exist!
Gravitaxis is his most recent CCC-related animation.
What stands out about it is the fact that it’s animated backwards.
Oh sure, you think, so he just animated it and then played backwards - no!
He pictured what the movement should look like if it were in reverse and then animated
it.
I know this because the original video is pure Flash, a good ol’ .swf file.
Flash has no option to reverse a video, so if you wanted to play something backwards
you would have to either write an ActionScript code to do it or individually move all 8,088
pictures the animation is made out of so they are in backwards order.
Plus, some of the movements are weird looking if you play the animation forward.
So while I think some of the sequences were animated normally and then the frames were
moved around to be reversed, for the most part the animation was planned and drawn backwards.
Wow!
The backwards theme goes really well with the video’s story, since it’s about the
character Icaro and his gravity reversing shoes.
At the end of the video - which is the beginning of the story - the guards have caught him
with a mass of blue packets that are a fictional drug called “Full Color CCC.”
As Icaro falls up, he throws the packets down all over the town, and later he sprays the
drug in a guard’s eye and that's what causes the rainbow effect we see here.
Icarus - I mean Icaro - then plummets to the ground.
What we see at the beginning of the video, then, is the moment before impact.
I’ll leave you to think about that one.
The animation itself is a mix of frame-by-frame and tweens.
In other words, every time you see the character it’s a new drawing, but a lot of times that
character is made of pieces that can be moved, aka tweened.
This shot here, the arms and the hair are separate pieces from the body.
That's why the hair can be pushed around to look flowy, and the arm can move up faster
without affecting the body drawing.
It gives it more life than a rigid drawing stuck in one position, but it saves the animator
a bunch of time because they only have to draw the character once for that shot.
After the pieces are drawn, the animator just tells them to move from one spot to another
over a period of time.
That’s called a tween.
The arm moving here is a tween.
(2:42) The arm moving here is frame-by-frame.
(2:44)
Haha, sorry, I’m having a moment where at this point I’ve watched the animation so
many times to make this video for you, and I’m remembering just how awesome it is after
all these years.
The timing and emotion are synced so well with the music.
The music goes up, the character falls up, the music calms down, we see the character
falling out of the world and into the vast expanse of space.
Such good scene selection to tell the story.
Vinnie takes on some pretty challenging animation.
When the guard has Icaro by the sleeve, the two are rotating, so the size of everything
keeps changing as it gets closer or farther from our point of view.
You have to have a good sense for how something looks from every angle to animate this right.
Same deal over here, with an even more difficult animation.
The camera moves all the way around the cart.
At the same time it starts above the cart at dice man’s head, moves down below the
cart, and then comes up to see inside it.
So the camera is moving on this downward upward spiral thing.
Since you can’t just tell a camera to do that on a 2D animation, you really have to
have a sense of dimensional space to pull it off as you are drawing each picture in
that animation.
So much rotating, aaahh!
This animation is- This is animating without fear!
No fear that it might not turn out perfect, no fear that it you can’t do it, only a
desire to make what is in your mind’s eye come to life!
You want it to rotate?
You DO it!
No whining!
Aye, I was going to talk about how the art used to look amazing to me and now since I
could animate it myself, it seems dull and there are places where the animation could
have been improved, places where the colors didn’t fill correctly because of the close
gap tool, but you know what!
No!
This is good animation!
I like it!
And you know what else I like?
There are all these little details in the backgrounds.
Look, tic-tac-toe, a clock with 5 hands, a broken plunger, a kite is stuck here , cactus
burgers - yeah, that's awesome cactus burgers - a piano key roof.
This is the type of detail in Vinnie’s artwork.
That’s the city of CCC.
If you want to read the comic and see more of Vinnie Veritas’ animations, all of those
materials are below!
There’s animated skits, great music like Spanish Flea, an animated cartoon series called
Astromiau… oh… oh dear.
Uh, come back next week.
I’ll catch you on the flip sideeeee!