Kitty and the Rainy Day (H.o.p.'s 2nd Flipboom movie)

Kitty and the Rainy Day from H.o.p. on Vimeo.

Here’s H.o.p.’s second animation in Flipboom.

H.o.p. started on this on Sunday night last, immediately after finishing his first Flipboom movie, and did much of the work in one sitting. Then he worked on the animation in fits and starts what amounted to a couple of other days during the week. His computer crashed at one point and he lost two scenes (an evening’s work) which took the wind out of his sails for a little while. Also, he was conflicted on the scenes with the Loch Ness monster and spent a couple days trying to figure out viewing angles.

This was the first animation in which he has ever tried to do the movement of mouths for laying in voices afterward. He labored hard over it, having me say the lines for him so he could examine how my mouth moved, and it worked beautifully when he was speaking the lines before we got down to doing the recording. Once we were doing the recording, however, he didn’t hit things right on target, distracted with excitement, but he was happy with what he got regardless.

H.o.p. came up with the story and did all the animation, and he did the voices and he did the sound effects and he chose the Benny Hill theme to go in the movie as background music.

I did a very lame job of recording those voices, effects and music in Audacity. I just couldn’t get things right. It had taken me a while to get it set up in the first place, and H.o.p. was anxious to get it all done and up so there were no retakes, everything was first try.

H.o.p. likes Flipboom–it’s a very easy and intuitive program to work in. It’s so easy that he was able to do the first couple scenes in one night, the first night he began working in the program.

If there’s something H.o.p. doesn’t care for about the program, it’s that the paint bucket tool doesn’t always work. An object has to be entirely enclosed for the paint bucket to fill it in and an object can look enclosed but the paint bucket won’t work. In some instances the paint bucket won’t fill entirely. You can also see where some lines enclosing objects seem to also disappear.

One needs to be aware that when you’re exporting an animation, a good bit of cropping occurs. For instance, in the scene where the three cats are standing and talking together, one was originally able to view the center cat’s whole mouth and below the mouth as well. I realized this happened when H.o.p. did his first Flipboom, and told him he should make sure to have some bleed area but he promptly forgot my warning.

I think he did a great job. And he’s quite pleased with his effort.

If you want to leave any comments you can do so on H.o.p.’s blog where he’s also posted the movie.