Earmarks, Yes or No

OK, so this is a bit behind the news cycle, but since I am not really a professional artist or cartoonist, it takes some time to get from concept to final product. I'm re-using parts of the 'O' character and bringing in a second character (hope you can guess who it might be).

I ran a little long with the monologue showing the apparent change in philosophy on certain types of spending the government seems to be taking on, but I thought it interesting that spending in some areas is presumed to need less scrutiny than others.

Anyway, to avoid the lip synch function in Anime Studio from interacting with the wood sounds, I created gaps in the monologue for some of the 'tweening'. The Anime output was exported with the sound turned off. Windows Movie Maker was used to bring the video output and sound together.

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Fun Anime Creation

Cartoons are a new addition to hamgrownvideos.com. The first creation below is a fun toon that was easier to create than you might imagine. The cartoon was made with Anime Studio 5. A close to full version can be downloaded for free at Smith Micro. With the free download, you are unable to export the toon, but you can create and play anything you can imagine inside the tool. So you can get a pretty good level of comfort before making a purchase (I'm a big fan of 'try before you buy' products). If you decide to purchase, it's only $49.99.

The most difficult part of creating this toon was drawing our President. I'm obviously not a pro, but it looks reasonable for posting. Anime Studio comes with a 'lip sync' feature that lets you import an audio track (.wav file) and the tool will automatically sample through multiple layers of the head with different mouth shapes to make it appear to speak along. The arm and head movement is easily done with what the tool calls 'bones'. Just add the bones to arms, legs, etc, and use the mouse to drag the limbs to the desired position across a timeline. The tool automatically moves the character for you between timeline points.

Enjoy.



-- hamedelic

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