A look back at my first try at animating a cartoon

As long as I can remember I wanted to be a cartoonist. I watched them. I liked them. And I wanted to make them. 

Growing up I got the "How To Draw Cartoons" books. Most of them dealing with just how to draw a character. And if you wanted something more advanced they dealt more with doing it for comic books. But unless you had motion camera you were S.O.L. Except for the occasional flip-book animation you could make in a notebook to show your friends.

When I was in high school there was a one-time course that was offered called "cartooning" that i took but it wasn't too helpful. You were basically taught how to do a flip-book on index cards. At the end of the 1 month class the teacher filmed them all together and played it for the class. I was happy to see something I did for once on film but didn't really learn anything.

Cut to years later--- Christmas 2002 
I got Flash 5 for my computer. This was the heyday of sites creating internet cartoons, Icebox, Wildbrain, Renegade and more were all putting them out I wanted to do it too.

Overview

At the Time I was making comic books for my kids, Xylus and Dexter. They wrote and starred in them and I taught myself to use Photoshop by doing this. So I thought I'd use this as my learning tool for Flash in the same way.

Issue 6 comic book cover

Concept

Me and the boys used a toy digital camera they had and shot a segment where they were the spoiled, rich, comic book stars. As they sat with their fancy sunglasses drinking root beer, they told their agent to make them in to cartoons. What? How?.. What?

Xylus and Dexter Sitting with their agent

Then the magic. 

Magic wand turns them into cartoons

This was actually an effect built into the toy camera program we used. I imported the video into flash as the first part of the cartoon when we were done.


Then Poof! They're cartoons. 
And to prove it--- unnecessary violence without consequence.

Xylus is hit with a giant mallet

Art

This first cartoon literally took me the weekend to make. No set ups. No layouts. No storyboards. I just wanted to see what would happen (Not really, I just had no idea what I was doing).

I barely knew how Flash worked and just jumped into it. I drew some quick character models of each with the line tool and colored them.

Basic structure of the characters in Flash

Animation

I animated the whole thing by winging it. The scenes were created as I went along against the recorded audio imported into the program. I learned later this was not a smart thing to do. But this was such a small segment I didn't know any better.

Audio

The audio for the cartoon was even recorded on an old flat cassette deck, like the kind you would find at a public library. If you listen to the part at the end, you can hear the buttons snap out of the record position when I pushed stop at the end. 
The sound effects and music are from a collection of cartoon music and SFX CD's that I had. I edited them in as their own layers in the timeline.

Cartoon

So here's my first cartoon in all it's glory from 2003.

Dexter and Xylus Become Cartoons

Next time I'll post my first 3 part story line I made after this.