Art I have become James' Protege(sp?)

[Epitome]

[size=1]Yes, you heard right, James doesnt know it yet, but I am his protege. I have been talking to him alot lately about his style of animation in his banners and I thought I would give it a shot and its not as easy as it looks. You have to take it frame-by-frame which is very time consuming. And you have to make sure its not jumpy like mine is, but it was my first attempt. So what do you think?

[url]http://img33.exs.cx/img33/739/ffacbanner5.gif[/url]

P.S. Its not done.

EDIT: Okay, I realized that mine sucked compared to James' so I quit already... lol[/size]

[James]

[color=#707875]Actually, this is very good for a first attempt. It takes a little time to start working in borders and smooth camera movement (in fact, I hardly ever do manual movement of the frames, other than finding the area I want by using the dimensions of the image as a kind of viewfinder).

I think it's not necessary to worry about moving the image around the canvas right now. The main thing is just to learn to put the frames down, put your borders on there, and get it done with a good repeat (ie: so that it doesn't sharply repeat itself) and of course, to keep the memory as low as possible.

But I don't think this is a bad attempt. You just need practice, is all. ^_^[/color]

[Epitome]

[size=1]The only thing I dont get, is how do you get yours to move at the same speed as the actual footage? Mine was very jumpy and didnt move at the right speed...[/size]

[James]

[color=#707875]Well, you have to make sure that your frame display time is correct.

On my animations, each frame will usually display for either 6/100ths of a second, or 8/100ths of a second.

Frame display time is crucial, because that dictates the speed and fluidity of your animation. It is then possible to change frame display times at different parts of the animation, in order to achieve a different effect (ie: slow motion, or high speed).

In my latest banner, however, that wasn't the technique I used. The reason that the slow motion part looks very smooth is because it contains many, many frames. Each frame only shows a very small movement. So the end result is that you can keep your frame rate the same (about 6/100ths of a second) but still achieve a very fluid slow motion effect. [/color]

[Epitome]

[size=1]Ohhhh, okay. The program I used automatically set it to 5/100th's when I loaded it so I assumed that was right. Okay thanks.[/size]

[Baron Samedi]

[size=1]Gotta keep an eye on the size of the file. But that was a very good first animation. I don't know what program you used, so I can't compare it to Serif, but it's still a good job. Try out borders though...I know with Serif it's easy to do, bt it might not be with everything.[/size]