Toonboom vs Flash

A um ano atrás, antes do projeto do sítio, não me parecia tão óbvio qual programa escolher para animar em cutout digital, mas hoje me vejo na posição de dizer: não tem como voltar para o Flash.

A primeira aula de toonboom que assisti foi um tanto frustrante. O software além de ser cheio de bugs tinha problemas com network, efeitos etc... O programa deu um salto nos últimos anos passando a perna não só no flash mas em qualquer outro programa de animação. Alguns bugs continuaram mas nada que não dê para contornar.

Verdade que, trabalhando no estúdio, com o pessoal que já havia animado toda a série do Meu Amigãozão, tive vários atalhos. A curva de aprendizado foi reduzida na troca com toda a galera... Não sei se seria tão tranquilo aprender do zero, mas o que posso dizer numa analise final foi que valeu s pena a dor de cabeça.

O Toonboom ainda tem muito espaço para melhorias mas acredito que se configura hoje como o melhor software de animação para cutout no mercado.

A versão que usamos no Sítio do Pica-pau Amarelo foi o Harmony, que é um Toonboom bombado que, além de ter mais ferramentas, funciona em rede, gerenciando as cenas, biblioteca etc...

O Flash coitado, tá moribundo. A adobe já anunciou que parou de desenvolver o flash player por causa do HTML5, que agora traz a possibilidade de se fazer animação com gráficos vetoriais direto na página, sem player ou embeds etc. Agora é questão de tempo para o Flash cair naquela categoria de programas esquecidos, que ficam na prateleira pegando pó...será!?

Diego Stoliar

30 Months Without Posting

Many, many...mmaaaany months without posting....to be precise 30 months. Wow? 30 months!? It has been THAT long?

In the mean time I got married, rented an apartment with my wife, we got pregnant, I did lots and lots of My Big Big Friend storyboards at 2Dlab, My studio Won it's first grant to develop a Tv Show togheter with Copa Animation Studio and I supervised the animation of a bunch of episodes of the Yellow Woodpecker Ranch for 2DLab, Mixer and Globo. Now I'm buying my first apartment and developing a new series on my spare time (almost none as you may guess). Next step - My Big Big Feature...





Gonna make some update on the site, and probably gonna start to write in Portuguese too... See you in the next post.

Pause for Drawing

This is a illustration for a site where me and some friends will post drawings for now on. Is a little community of animators, storyboarders and comic artists who live and work in Brazil. The first month theme is the site head image, and that's my version of it. The boos character is saying the name of the site in brazilian portuguese: PAUSE FOR DRAWING??? UHAAAAaaaa...

Fortaleza

This weekend I gonna be for the first time at #19 Cine Ceara Festival, in Fortaleza, to be part of a seminar board about "Animation publishing and education in Brazil". The table is part of an event called "Animation as a Transformation Tool" at the International Seminar of Animation Cinema! I hope it will be FUN!

Check out the spot:


I suppose they called me manly because of 2 websites that I manage with the help of some wonderful brazilian animators that have enough vision to help themselves, by helping our national animation field to grow. Thank you guys!

One of the sites is called SeAnima - Student Animation Society. This one tries to put in portuguese all the info possible about animation production, tecnique, development, new technologies, Open Source etc...

The other site is called Animapedia - An Animation Enciclopedia. This one is an atempt to begin a brazilian way of talking "Animationese". Brazil is a fast growing animation market and our history was marked with self-education and small animation teams. That segregation creates some comunication problems for bigger teams today. This also makes preatty hard to have good brazillian-portuguese translations of animation books. Therefore, animapedia tries to get animators opinions about how could we translate the tecniques and what each tecnique really means.

I still wish to create a site about Brazillian Animation in english, but time had been short nowadays. Maybe next year.
The hardest part actually is to find people that writes about animation in english (although I have some people interested already).

I Wanna be a Tv Show!

Hey, How about that! Melanie Pal from Little Airplaine Productions did a nice 'Planet Preschool' Post about Anima Mundi Anima Forum and Brazilian series creators at Kidscreen website. I talked with Melanie about my show with the folks from Flamma (my partners) and she took a picture of us!

Nice! Animamundi was Fun!

Storyboard Pro

Nowadays I've been learning Storyboard Pro to work on "My Big Big Friend" production and I'm already making my list of "bugs" and improves for the Toonboom team. They are very open to users inputs, and that's making the hole difference between their software and adobe's softwares.

Storyboard still in his infant version. It still has some performance problems and some nonsense tools. Some tools are there but doesn't work as one expect. But still the best peace of software to work a board, especially if you are in a Harmony production, since Storyboard Pro exports the board as PDF, an Animatic version and the hole scene structure for the animators to work on (scene setup).

Some things are quite good (like custom brushes that can automatically change layers as they are selected) and others that are quite bad (like the Paint tool, that doesn't avoid painting what is already painted). Some stuff could be more powerfull and pratical (like the hole timeline view and audio tracks) and some things work quite well (like the fact that you can draw on thumbnails in all the views).

Making it short: It's not there yet but it's definelly a software to keep one eye on. It will probably rule in a couple of versions.

Pink Hair, Pink Ice Cream

Done with ArtRage!