[Peter Satera]

Alright, I've been getting a few PM's and the odd email asking where to start or how to start an animation with a storyline. Unlike what I'm about to do now nobody ever told me the right way to start and move on through an animation from beginning to the end. Including idea juggling and post production. But these days a lot of you want to add even a small bit of a plot into your movies but have no idea where to begin.

This thread isn't for the likes of people that have used flash animation for a good number of years and know how to make a plot. If you already do make animations run by a story then this isn't really worth your time reading over. Unless you're bored.

Alright, first off know that there are THREE main stages in animation. Preproduction. Production. And Post Production. In this thread I'll go through them, explaining each. Alright let's begin.

PREPRODUCTION.
STARTING OFF
A lot of people make the mistake of opening flash and animating straight away. Then by end of the week comes the animation fla file is closed and never reopened because people aren't interested in it anymore. Trust me, I did it several times and it never worked once for me without. Nothing good will come from it. So let me introduce Preproduction to you. This could possibly be the life saver that forces you to keep going with your production and never give up!

Alright, you want to make a story. You don't know what happens in it, who's in it, or how it will begin or end. So it's time to figure these things out. Get yourself a notepad or something. It’s time to find out what you want in your animation. Do some research into the things you like. You should already know this, nobody knows you better than you. You might like fast cars so quickly, scribble that down. You mite like gun fights, so quickly scribble that down. You might like the idea out of Bad Boys 2 where the threw cars from a truck on the freeway (motorway). So yeah everything that has ever tickled you just right that you watch write it down. Write as much as you can. Spend a half hour at least thinking up things you would love to do in your animation. Here’s a things that I wrote down before I did Rival.

Car Chases
Gun fights
Martial Arts
Rivalry
Emotional Loss
Hidden power
one Vs many
overpowering music
present and future time
family involvement
the matrix
Explosions

Cheesy? Certainly is! But this will be your back bone for your synopsis (a short brief written plot), so you need it. Now, it’s time to be realistic. You may be not the best animator on the planet, everyone has to start somewhere. So it’s time to think of what you are capable of. Well, at the time you might not be good at explosions, so you would really like to limit yourself to animating those. So you would possible score it off. You may not like the idea of hidden power to go along with gunfights, they certainly wouldn’t in most cases. So you might want to scrap that, so on and so forth.

STORY BUILDING
Now what do you do with the rest. Well this is the hard part, probably the hardest part of any animation. You have to think up a story that has everything together. But with the right thinking and taking two or three words from your list you could come up with great ideas. How about ‘future’ and ‘hidden power’ for instance? Well, you could make it that there is a hidden power that would allow you to alter the fabrics of time. Meaning your character could jump from past present and future fixing things or destroying them. Maybe if you take an idea that there is a good time traveler and a bad one, the bad guy is out to make himself wealthy and powerful, where as the good wants to put a stop to this. Or how about Car chases and Rivalry? That could possibly equal fast and the furious. Add guns to that and you have a high paced action movie!

RESEARCH
Now why am I mentioning Fast and the furious and Bad Boys, or the Matrix. Well this is where all your research will come from, from what you are inspired by. The amount of research every animation needs is extremely extensive. If you choose to make an animation about cars then you better find out as much as you can about cars! If you plan on racing a Skyline GTvspec against a Lamborghini Diablo then you better know what part of the car in the Diablo and The Skyline has the engine in it. The front or the back? This will make a huge difference when that car has to jump a ramp. It may dive nose first, or it may dive ass hanging. Research everything as much as possible. A mistake I made back then in Rival 1, 2 and 3 was that I didn’t research. So when I showed a shotgun fire it showed one bullet come out. BEEP WRONG! When a shotgun fires it sprays the shell because of the power it shoots at. The shell crumbles into several pieces and they all fly toward the target. That’s why in Max Payne 3d he shoots once and it creates about 7 different bullet marks. He’s researched it well. Even when it comes to drawing a background is research of the most importance. Your character may walk into a lobby. So research lobbies, check out the structures of it all, the way the desk may be positioned or the way that the entries are cornered off incase of an emergency. Your character may be an agent undercover, does an agent undercover where sunglasses and a huge trench coat. I think not! They would be the most natural person looking there, a nobody. Please look into what you are animating, it will make a huge difference to your overall animation, because people will be constantly judging your animation skills against the physics of life. Google Images and Yahoo Images will be your best friend for the week you spend researching.

SYNOPSIS
Alright, so lets say you have a brief story in mind. Mine was brother dies, for some reason, father and main brother finds out. Main character heads for revenge and answer to why. Simple and direct. Now it’s time to broaden that out a bit. You want to write how the character dies, when he dies. Was it day? Night? In a jungle or parking lot? These things matter. Who is the assumed killer? Is it Hitler, or tarzan? So these things matter, and these are the things you write in your synopsis in order of how they happen. Start off like;

"...it was night and three men are seen running into the house with guns they fire, the window lights up with the gunshots and we hear screams. All of a sudden another shot is fired and the screaming stops."

Now remember this is where you plan to capture your audience. Your first 20seconds better be a good 20. Because this will be the difference of someone thinking of hitting that X on the pc on sfdt or newgrounds. Now in the example I gave I said that they went in and fired a gunshot then there was screaming, and then there was silence after another gunshot. Well from that thought, we don’t know if one person is dead or two. So be creative in your thinking, if you can keep the viewer wondering then they will most probably stay glued to your animation. I can guarantee that some people hate Rival, but they will watch it just to see where I take my story, even if it is a terrible one. So gripping scenes and sequences will do your animation more justice. This could be something complicated like a torture scene or a simple scene with a man getting his divorce papers. Both have that element of why, why is this happening, why did you choose to take your time to animate this, what’s so important that you need to show people this scene? So go through your story bit by bit. No longer than a page long writing what happens in order.

SCRIPT
Once you’ve done this then you have another backbone, this time for your script. That’s right, having a script is really important. Especially for a plot animation. You’ll find this is where your creative skills show and come in. A script should be in as much detail as possible for when you come to storyboard it. When you do storyboard it, the more information you have on paper, the easier you will know where to stick the camera.

Now check out script formats. A good example is this buffy one I came up with. When you have a good script format, and you need voice actors, all you do is hand them the detailed script. This will make life for you so much easier as an animator. It means you don’t have to explain their emotions and reasoning for saying a line, because it will already be down on paper. It’s also for ease of reading for yourself.

Here’s the buffy script: http://support.sfdt.com/files/buffy_the_vampire_slayer.html
As soon as you open that what do you see? The title of your movie and the name of the writer. Yup that’s you! You are now not only an animator, but a screenwriter/scriptwriter too!

On a script every scene you start it with this.

eg.
EXT. MEDIEVAL VILLAGE - JUST BEFORE SUNSET

So what are these? EXT stand for exterior (INT for interior). Medieval Village is the location of where your scene is, it could be a coffee shop or a back alley. And ‘Just before sunset’ , is the time of day. Usually its written DAY or NIGHT, but in this case, the writer wanted to show the sun is going down. This suddenly sets you up for your background in your animation. You know EXACTLY where it will be and when. Now for backgrounds, that is really vital knowledge!

Other script terms you may want to know are OC, which is off camera, and VO, which is Voice over.

"We see an Italian village at the height of the plague. Funeral processions, decrepit houses with their windows boarded up... the stench of death all around."

If you continue looking at the buffy script then you see the above. This is an action, it explains how the scene should be set. See how much detail is in that sentence. Every single thing he has said in that line is so relevant to the mood of your animation. It places setting and surroundings, which is of most importance to you. You will have to draw it what you are writing. So please know your limits, but on the other hand, the more detail you write now, the more that you don’t stop and think. Uhhh now what do I do? Uhhh. Further on:

"Through the filth a KNIGHT walks his horse. He is weary but not so dingy as his surrounding; a stranger in these parts. He comes to an inn, where a boy takes his horse round back. He enters the inn."

This is the writer explaining what’s happening and how the character is acting. A lot of scripts passed to me never mention this, but it’s so incredibly important! Especially for people who have to run off dialogue. Through the filth he walks his horse. Now it’s not a great example but never the less, we can still see the dirt this man is trailing in. You may imagine his back huddled over, thinking he’s been through a lot, panting for breath and dripping rain, mumbling away to himself. Or He could slowly creak the door open in a proud manner, back straight, rain streaming off his face, eyes glaring and solid jaw covered in dirt. He’s been through a lot, but nobody is gonna mess with him. Two different attributes that the writer should of considered, and you should too when writing a script. The more you do now, the less you have to think later and the less you get stuck later. So write your script, as detailed as possible, even noting camera angles if you think of really good ones. Even a sound of his footstep of the wood is important. Sounds make up half the animation, so remember to write about them too. They say about a page of script format is about a minute of action/animation. So it’s good to keep that mind when writing it to know how long your anim’ will be.

STORYBOARDS
A great preproduction process! Now that you have all your scenes and shots written down in script format you can take those and start thinking up where you would love to place the camera to show that shot to its most dramatic appeal. Lets take that scene where the guy walked in with the horse. You could show only the hand pushing the door open, dripping with mud, then as soon as the door opens you start from the bottom of his shoes, slowly panning up to his face. Now there are quick storyboards and there are storyboards which go through every single shot of your animation. If you love to draw, and wish to do it right then I suggest every single shot. Because missing out camera angles can confuse sometimes what you should do next in your animation. Most likely it’s be a flash anim you are making so, you could put every camera angle and different shot down, it will only take you a second to quickly draw that character. Storyboard it start to finish. You don’t have to do it all at once, but yeah, do it. Don’t do the start of it then start animating, cause then you will never finish the storyboarding process and get lazy.

Here’s an example of the shite-ness you could do it in. Trust me, well thought out angles and positions will make your animation 100% more cinematic. And that’s what plots are all about.


Some people really enjoy storyboarding, so give it a whirl. You might love it!

CONCEPT ARTWORK
I love this bit! This is when you sit and draw your character(s) on how you would like to see him(them) animated. Sometimes with a bit more detail too since it’s a bit of concept work. This can be done with pencil or whatever you like! Here is an amazing piece of Stick Concept work from our very own Ralf at SFDT. Hopefully he won’t mind me putting it up, but I strongly believe it’s a prime example of what digital concept artwork stands for. Great work Ralf! ;)



Do a good few bits of concept work to make sure you can really animate that character. Concept work doesn’t just have to be art. It can be animated tests too! So take a few nights just to relax back and slowly mess about before you take the big leap.

ANIMATICS
Some of you will go what? "Whats an animatic?" Well an animatic is still shots of your animation timed to your soundtrack (music plus voice acting). This way it helps with timing to the perfect second. Some people scan there storyboards and use those and put them in the timeline in order it will be shown. With the soundtrack over it. It will bound to make you eager to start animating it. Animatics aren’t essential. But they are helpful, extremely. The more and more you use them, the more you realize you want them.

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PRODUCTION METHODS and PRODUCTION TECHNIQUES

Alright. Here we go. This is the VERY long one.

Now there is no doubt that the majority of animators here use Macromedia Flash to animate. So when I write that I’ll keep that in mind, however this doesn’t mean that there won’t be references to other programs for production. Especially since the 3d community has taken off, and progressively got bigger. It could even be bigger than the Flash Community today. Anyway, on with our main event tonight. Production!

Whether you are an amateur or intermediate.

PRODUCTION METHODS
Alright a production method is different to the techniques. Method is the theory behind animation, whereas techniques are you actually using a program. Just to quickly clarify that.

Now in flash animation, you can’t simplify a cinematic story easier than animating your shot (a storyboard panel) then change to your next shot, and animate that. Then you just repeat the process. In flash, in my opinion, there is no other way to animate a cinematic story. Jumping from shot to shot just creates confusion unless you have a shot list, which is a little too deep for flash animation. So stick to the animate shot, move on to next method.

So there are three things you should have beside you when animating your story.

Number 1, your research. A lot of people hate research. Heck I really do at times. But it’s vital number 1 when animating. When you have to draw a door, what’s the first thing you think of? Handle, wood, 4 panels. Yuck! What are you? 3 Years old?! The first thing you should have really thought about is 'what is the door for' and 'where is it'? A door in a church will be different from a door in a house, or a door in a school. That’s right simple as a door may be, we have thousands of different breeds. Putting in that right door will create that authentic look. Remember what I said in preproduction, you WILL be judged against the physics of real life, and not just about movement, but the reality of a setting. Research enables you to go through what you’ve found out and take ideas from it. It’s not stealing, because if it was, then every movie, television and animated production wouldn’t do it. Research makes you observe. That’s what it’s all about; observation is the most important thing to an animator. Observational skills allows you to take what is around you and put it into your own world, your movie. So print out your research so you can jump through it. Having it on the pc helps a bit, but I find have 6-8 different images on a sheet of A4 produces new ideas, it doesn’t have to be great quality, purely having the idea in front of you is the main importance.

Number 2, your script. Your script contains information your storyboard doesn’t. It has the smells and sounds written on them, things you forget about after you are 200 shots into your movie. It will explain in more detail the movement of your action and the approach you should take to starting it. It’s also great for when you have to pick it up, and send to those wonderful voice actors. But animation wise a small paragraph of info can remind you of what you were aiming in that shot.

Number 3, your storyboard. With your storyboard you are going to take every single image on that piece of paper and make it into an animate shot. Make the resemblance as close as to each other as much as possible. Obviously in some shots you will have to change the angle completely because it doesn’t work, but in most cases you storyboard cuts thinking very short, you know exactly where to put your camera with the look of your stills. Eg.



As you can see there are differences between the two due to the screen sizes but both have same attributes. Alright. So hopefully now you see why you did (or will do) preproduction. Let’s move on.

Now that you have an understanding of getting it from storyboard to animation, or animatic to animation then I’ll move onto some 2d animation tips.

Tip 1.
Cycles
Nope, not bicycles, tricycles or anything like that. A Cycle is an animation that you create that can be repeated seamlessly. So the last frame from the animation will work with your first. Examples of this are walk cycles or run cycles. I’m not going to tell you how to animate these, because that’s an entirely different story all together. There are hundreds of examples already out there. Now why would you want to do this? It saves a lot of time and a lot of effort, and for companies, a lot of money. Usually cycles consist of things that are seamlessly repetitive. Cycles are pretty self explanatory.

Tip 2.
Ease in and ease out.
Okay what is meant by this? When you show an object animated whether it be a car, or a flying fist, you always have to remember to apply the ease in and ease out rule. Without even realising we do it we always build up to a speed and then slow down. It’s like a speeding car, it starts off slow, then gets faster and faster, but when it stops, it’s not a sudden stop. Even when the brakes are hit full throttle, the car comes to a slow stop. This rule applies to everything. Here’s a really quick example I did.

Check out this rolling ball. In real life the ball, (like every object) slowly builds up speed, and slowly drops it. The top one has no ease in or ease out. The ball is so gradual it could be on a flat escalator moving along. Whereas the second one the ball has more realistic properties. Granted it’s not perfect, but it looks more like a rolling ball than the top one. It should really speed up more in the middle. So let me drill this into your mind. This rule is soooo important. Why? Because it shows weight, speed AND friction. An all importance for us animators who are trying to copy realism. Even the animators who are taking more of a cartoon appeal this is of most importance because they only intend to bend the rule not do away with it.

Now if you like to animate fighting this is the secret for you. The more you ease in and ease out the faster your motion will seem. Some animations (DBZ, anime, Batman, Justice League, etc for example) entirely miss out the bit in the middle, and just animate the ease in ease out parts. This shows intense and incredible speed. For super overpowered beings this is of most importance. And for you, you may want to show your main protagonist being super fast and super strong. Disney doesn’t really do it, because they want to keep their motion realistic as possible. By taking out the middle part you are pushing realism to an extreme. That’s why I mentioned super powers etc. So please! Ease in almost everything.

There are exceptions to this rule. Sometimes you want that jerkiness. Such as when one object hits another. When object 1 hits object 2 then object 2 will gain the acceleration and speed off of object 1. Like Newton’s Cradle. You know...the one where one ball hits another, goes up and comes down and hits to make the other go down. Well, the idea behind that is simple. Kinda.. Because both balls have the same mass then the acceleration is transferred to one ball to the other. "uhHU!" I hear you scream, "you are wrong!". The Balls eventually stop and slowdown to a halt. True. They do. So was Newton wrong? Psh course not. The balls eventually slow down due to air friction. When the transferring ball rises it slowly bit by bit is getting slower because of the air around it. Ok.. Enough of the physics lesson. Cause basically, I hate physics. So, there are lots or things you have to think about when one thing hits another. Friction against air, friction against ground and friction of anything else that the object is against. Then you have to think about weight, (sheesh.. this is getting deep). Because a bus weighs a hell of a lot more than a car when the car hits a bus it barely moves, whereas when a car hits a car because they are practically the same weight then the car will move back. Alright I’m babbling, I’m sure you get the idea...

Another exception to the rule are cycles. Because cycles are constant, consistent and repetitive, they will have no ease in and ease out. Is your head bursting yet?

Tip 3
Follow through
Alright follow through animation isn’t something to do with jobbies! Follow through animation is the extra force of a movement. Well, it’s the only way I can think of how to explain it. Above I’ve been talking about movement passed onto one another, but not all motion is always passed right through from one object to another. It does keep some motion and force. I use fighting a lot in my examples so I’ll use something else this time around. Think about a guy standing at the top of the stairs. He is about to jump down 8 stairs. (Stupidly enough, I’ve done this. And what’s more stupid about it is, I counted the stairs). Alright so the guy jumps, and he lands on his feet. The follow through motion would be his body curling up once he has hit the ground. Although his feet land firmly his body still wants to continue going down. This is follow through animation. Even once something has stopped the motion of an object the object will still contain directed motion. I’m going to be honest, I’m finding this murder to explain without showing some sort of visual. But this is something a lot of animators do without realising. Alright... fighting examples…sigh. Violence, violence, violence… When one guy punches another the person throwing the fist won’t stop dead once he hits his opponent, his hand will continue moving, the movement that continues after the impact is the follow through animation. As I said… most of you probably already do it without knowing but it’s worth keeping in mind.

Tip 4
Gain up
I don’t know the real animation term for this, so I just called it gain up. This refers to animation of a person really. Gain up is when something goes in the opposite direction to imbalance the force it will go. Sorta like when a person is sitting in a chair. Well when they go to get up from the chair they don’t automatically go forward, they move slightly back and then go forward. It’s a kind of elastic band effect, where something has to go back before going forward. These tips really are for getting your animation right more than anything else. Things that you should of already been thinking about just to make sure its that little more a bit realistic.

Tip 5
Overlapping Action
This one however I’ve seen a lot of people do. If you aren’t one of the more established animators on the site (please take no offence) then this might apply to you. Overlapping action is when your character is doing more than two things at once. As naturally born humans we do it all the time. Simple things as moving a chair while picking up a cup at the same time or standing up while picking up our books. This is what’s classed in animation as Overlapping Action. Now what happens if you animate it separately? Then your character comes out robotic. Because it IS so expected to see people do many things at once then we expect our animated characters to do the same, any different and it looks really out of place. So please remember to animate those swinging arms as he walks, or to arch that back while he’s bending down to pick up a clue on the ground. Slowly you’re probably getting scared if you haven’t thought about any of this before. But hopefully now that you know of them you will start putting these tips into use.

Unfortunately there isn’t any information on the internet anywhere that will make you a super animator super quick. All the information that you read within these forums are true. Practice makes perfect. Animation is for the patient, and if you don’t have patience then you are probably doing the wrong thing. If you do come to a shot which is too difficult for you to do, there are always ways of getting round it. One way is to ask for help, but rarely people will take the time out to show you how to do things, and sometimes it doesn’t even help your understanding. There is a second solution though and that is to basically watch animated movies frame by frame, studying it bit by bit if it’s an effect. Or if it’s a movement that a person does get someone you know to do the movement and try and imitate that as best as you can through animation. Pixar animators put this to use as they have a department which allows them to go into a cupboard and act out a shot or scene. They record themselves and then watch the movement over and over again on the pc copying it as much as they can. This is why some of the movement that they do is very realistic because a lot of the time it’s copied from life and with cheap modern technology these days you can too.


PRODUCTION TECHNIQUES
Okay, Production Techniques. I’m not going to get into how to use flash, how to insert a Keyframe and how to use movie clips etc because frankly that’s how to learn a program. Not how to learn to animate. So here are some principle animating techniques that are used today and some that were used in the 1930’s.

Now every flash animator will have heard of what a Keyframe is. They may think it’s when you right click and hit ‘insert blank keyframe’. But Macromedia have actually taken it from the animation term of a keyframe which is slightly different. The kind of key frame I’m talking about is different to the type of keyframe Macromedia flash has in its program. Just to clarify that up a bit.

Okay, three terms for you guys (and gals) you HAVE to learn, Keyframe, break down frame and in-between frame. What I am about to explain is the way animation is created in the world of today and the way it has been done since 1930. Not by draw a stick, then draw another frame and another. It’s actually not done like that even though that is how you do it in flash (maybe). May I present REAL frame by frame animation. The way it should be done!”

For the example I will show a guy jumping from one spot to another.

Keyframe
A key frame is when you would draw the first extreme in your action and your last extreme in your action. Here is a really basic example. The starting point, and the finishing point.


Breakdown Frame
The break down marks more keyframes basically. They show the main points of change in the motion of your character. You would onion skin between the keyframes and judge the positioning of your character. Here the black stick images are the breakdowns, the faded are the keyframes in the background. The follow through can be seen in breakdown 3. The curl up with the force of the jump.



In-between Frames
The in-betweens are the frames that make up the animation. This is where you would use your ease in and out technique. You would show the bending down and initial jump the ease in. Then when he lands and stands up again is the ease out. I’ve only done 4 Inbetween examples, if I were animating this there could be about 15 inbetweens. It will depend on your frame rate.


Now the good thing about this technique is that you can time it exactly to the mille-second. So when you estimate a punch to be half a second then you just put your start and last frame to half a second. This means that you will never have to say, why the hell is my animation too slow, or too fast, and now you have to start again, because when you practice and learn this technique movement of animation is very smooth, and perfectly timed. As an animator, what more could you want!? And no more complaints that your animation is choppy! This stops that if you do it right.

Perspective. Alright, now perspective is important. Perspective is a good way to make realistic backgrounds with good angles. It’s a good way of showing things in distance. I don’t have time to go through perspective and how to draw it, so if you want to learn how to do it. I did a search to find some tutorials on them. Start off doing 1 point perspective, then a 2 point perspective. If you are mentally challenged then you can search yourself on how to do 3, 4, 5 and 6 point perspectives. 6 Point is when your drawing will look like a fish eye lens. It’s pretty insane, But right now, for animation at least, you wont need more than the 1 and 2 point perspective.

Perspective Tuts:
http://www.olejarz.com/arted/perspective/
http://www.drawthrough.com/tutorials/perspectives.html
http://lucidcomics.com/creatingcomics_perspective.htm
http://www.teamgt.com/forum/cubes01.htm

This is going on a bit too long now. So one thing about colour. Make your own custom colours. Never use the ones they give, unless you need black (which isn’t really a colour, it’s a tone). The colours they give you are for people who don’t have a clue about colour. But as an animator, you should! Colours should always be made from your custom 256million variety pallet. Choosing a more greyer choice in colour will make your stuff look more professional. Colour like animation is all about practice. So here’s some colour choices that I would use instead of the bold sharp default ones they give.



Well I hope this gave people a few tips on how to animate. I could say a lot more but since this is for more a beginner than anyone else so I didn’t go in too deep. Happy animating!

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The long awaited post production is here.

Sorry for the really extensive wait for the last part of animation making but I have been ever so busy you wouldn’t believe! But you guys deserve this for the wait. :P


POST PRODUCTION TECHNIQUES AND SOUND.
VOICES
Alright usually in big production voices are the considered before the animation is done. This means that animators can lip sync their animated characters perfectly to what the actors said and how their voice would portray a certain action. A lot of flash animators do it the other way around, just because getting voice actors can be a bit hard. Or sometimes the voice actor will disappear off the planet and a new one must be considered. Etc etc. So this is why I have left this to post production.

Alright, so maybe you want to record your own voice, or someone asks you to do it. You need to know the techniques to receive the best performance possible.

So there are several programs that can do this and since I’m a PC user I have no idea about recording on a Mac, so for that, my apologies. However PC users are still in luck. If you don’t wish to download, [i]soundforge, goldwave or audacity[i] then your next bet is to use, (dare I say it) sound recorder in your start menu. No seriously it can be used. No it can! Stop crying... please stop crying.

If you aren’t used to using sound recorder then you will probably just hit the record button straight away. Then play back, then think, "uh that sounds terrible" then close the program. But there is a reason why it sounds so bad. Mainly because Microsoft messed up and decided that it was a good idea to set the recorder at a horrific default of pathetic quality. So here is a way to change the properties of the sound recorder to make your voice not sound like a cat climbing up a chalk board.

1. First open sound recorder.
Start-> Programs-> Accessories -> Entertainment-> Sound recorder

2 File -> Properties

3. Now it says the audio format is 44.100 at 16bit Khz Stereo. Now repeat after me.
BULL...SHIT. For some reason it says that but it’s not really, I don’t know I it’s saving at different levels or what but its certainly not at 44Khz because that’s great quality.

For those who are interested about knowing what the hell I mean by 44.100 16bit Khz. It is useful to understand, but if you can’t be assed move on to number 4.

Humans hear different frequencies of sound and this is measured in Hz. So its said that (if I remember right) that humans hear nothing higher than 22.000Khz. So a low drum beat would be maybe 15 Hz, where as a high pitched squeal will be 15 thousand kilohertz. So apparently we cant hear more than 22khz, which would mean you wont hear the difference from 22Khz above. However in programs it’s not always true. So saving at Hz, raises the variety of levels it can hear. 16bit, etc is simply the quality of the sound. But since it’s getting imported to flash it won’t matter what quality it will be at, because you change the quality of sound again anyway.

4. You want to change the recording quality, so select under the drop down menu choose from-> recording formats, and select convert now.

5. Keep the format at PCM and see how the attributes is at 8 bit mono, 7kb per second, that’s what made your sound so bad recorded at first. So change the attributes by scrolling down to the bottom to 48,000khz 16kb at 187kb per sec.

6. Click save as, and call it best. This means next time you open sound recorder, you don’t have to scroll down but just simply select BEST. Click ok and ok again.

7. and record your sound. The bad thing about this is that as soon as you hit FILE-NEW it automatically goes back to the horrific default settings. So the best thing to do is if you don’t like what you recorded is to scroll to the end of your sound and say edit -> delete before current position. Then re record. This means it’s still the same file and won’t default the sound properties.

8. Saving. File-> save as and at the bottom is says Format. And once again it gives you this fake sound attribute. To prove this, as soon as you hit change it pops up with that 8bit mono setting. Uhh, yuck! Unfortunately flash doesn’t understand the quality of 48.000khz well it does, it just adjusts the speed for some reason. So to get by this change the NAME to CDquality. Which is already a preset under your ‘best’.

If you have done everything right then you should have a nice wav recording of your voice. Unfortunately this is a really time consuming procedure which is why Goldwave is recommended. Not only does it do all this as soon as you hit file-> new. But you can tell it to reduce hissing and hums that your pc may be giving off in the background while you whisper sweet nothings into your microphone.

Quality will also depend on your microphone, so a microphone with built in suppression would be a good idea. Or if you want to go further, you can buy a professional recording microphone which will fix all those S’s and P’s that sometimes make recordings pop etc etc.

EFFECTS
Although special effects should have been considered during production stage these can always be an addition when you go back over it all. Things like smoke, a light coming from one side to another can really make a difference. I won’t go into about how to do special effects because we all do them differently and it would be best if you teach yourself to create your own style. Something that has been apparent more in movies are colour tones. Where a tone is placed over in a movie to give it a cold or warm feeling. We can do this too simply by adding a square which is almost completely transparent with a colour in it. It can also create consistency within your movie.

FLASH 8 - UPGRADE ASAP
Flash 8 is worth the upgrade. Not because it has filters that can be added, because they can always be added if you had Photoshop, but purely that these filters can be animated. You can adjust the filters in movie clips over a period of time. Things can blur in and out and be in a constant vector state. Just get it. I’m not an adobe salesman. The more you realise how good the new filters are the better!

I’m battering right through this because it’s nearly 3am so I will finish it off with one more thing. Flash export settings what do they mean, and what should they be set to?

FLASH EXPORTING
So the things that pop up when you go to export your movie are

Version:
Always export your latest version. Flash 8 being the latest.

Load order:
This is the way your frames will be loaded into for the person watching your movie. It’s always best to do it bottom up. It’s just sensible.

Actionscript: This depends on your movie, if you’re an animator, like me, you will leave it what it is at lol. And pray your buttons work.:P

Options Generate Size Report: Pretty self explanatory up to you.
Options protect from import: Yeah click this box, you don’t want people importing your movie for any reason.
Options Omit Trace Actions: I dunno what this is, don’t touch it LOL!
Options Debuggin permitted: This means someone can decompress your movie easily, up to you if you want that available for people.
Options Compress movie: Of course! We all want our movies to be a small file size

Password: Stick in a password to protect your content

Jpeg Quality: Never go lower than 50. 100 if quality means more to you than file size.

Audio Stream: Alright this is the one I am gonna talk about quickly, Hit set. Keep the compression at mp3. Now right now because it’s only at default (16kilobytes per second) then the sound quality is kind crappy, you may want to boost this about 56Kb/s or higher. I do mine about 80Kb/s so I get nice sound quality. As one man said ‘sound makes half a movie’. Now you can see the convert ‘stereo to mono’ box is highlighted. Now at times when you watch a movie and you hear crackling it’s because the sound has been converted to mono, so I suggest taking this off. Fair enough your file size will rise but with connections today, downloads are super fast for the vast majority of internet users. And I would rather hear un-crackled sound and wait an extra minute than hearing a muffled movie that can stream. It takes away the professionalism of it all.

If you don’t know what all these Kb/s KHz are then read above and you will know why putting it higher makes a difference.

The same goes for Audio Event.

Leave the rest of the settings as they are, right now they are of no importance. And that’s it!!! If you are used to hearing a muffled sounded animation then you will definitely hear the difference when changing the export settings. I certainly did, and I was astonished at the improvement. Just remember the higher quality you put something, whether it is sound or image it will raise the file size so you have to be wise to what you raise it to. So that’s it!

I missed out what post production really is, such as after effects and premier, but for flash animators due to the export of a movie will most of the time be an swf, there isn’t really any other collaboration with any other product for post production. That is unless you are working for some major company that demand an avi or quicktime etc etc then you could use other major post production programs. But as for now, keep it simple, and if at first you don’t succeed try and try again and then if you don’t succeed. Post a complaint on some forums.

Happy animating and good luck!
Peter