For any of you that are interested, I've put up a page covering my recent experiences with animating. It's up at http://home.earthlink.net/~matrebholz/animation.html. I'd really appreciate any comments anyone has on it.

-- Matthew Rebholz (matrebholz@yahoo.com), September 13, 2000

Answers

Wow, Mat. That was pretty industrious of you, nice try at animation, first time around. Yeah, I pretty much believe attempting something yourself give you a greater appreciation of it, love to see your one minute debut. Cool.

-- Barb e. (Suesuesbeo@aol.com), September 13, 2000.

Aeon and Stereolab, this man has taste

-- William (stateofflux@yahoo.com), September 13, 2000.

Thanks, Barb, and everyone who's taken a look at the page. Wow, another Stereolab fan! I thought for the longest time that I was the only one...

-- Matthew Rebholz (matrebholz@yahoo.com), September 14, 2000.

no way, there are a lot of us :-)

-- William (stateofflux@yahoo.com), September 14, 2000.

hey, matthew... that was mighty generous to share a page of yours. i am one of these people who comes fairly regularly to this board to read all the interchanges. i seldom submit an answer, however. don't know why. but i digress. my true intention here was to thank you for sharing. it was great to look at your page as well. (i, too, am a stereolab fan.) and i guess i was wondering if any of you all who post answers on this forum have websites of your own to share. it was great to see more of matthew's personality, and i would also like to view any webpages of you fluxers. the end.

-- illy (yyen@hotmail.com), September 17, 2000.

I have mine at www.aeonflux.xs3.com

-- William (stateofflux@yahoo.com), September 17, 2000.

Thanks for your appreciation, illy. A friend of mine saw my page commented on how similar my characters were to those of "Aeon Flux", at least in how they were drawn. He doesn't like "Aeon Flux", says that the drawing style seems to "emphasize the butt", in his words. I just had to laugh about that... :)

-- Matthew Rebholz (matrebholz@yahoo.com), September 17, 2000.

out of boredom, today i drew a random picture in class of a character i made up that i like draw a lot. i remember reading matt's animation page and thought it would be cool to try something like this with the picture. i have a webcam and a corkboard up on my wall. i aimed the cam at the corkboard and took a shot of the picture i drew. i then drew another frame with slight movement, and put it exactly where the other was on the corkboard. i put them into a movie using adobe premiere for a fraction of a second each. although i only had 2 frames, the quailty was excellent! i used engineering paper at first but i think i'm gonna get tracing paper too. if you have a webcam and premiere or something close, i recommend you try this, it's pretty cheap and easy if you want to make simple animations!

-- joseph (jmaniwan@vt.edu), October 31, 2000.

Hmmm, interesting... I'll have to try that. I'm glad to have inspired you. :)

-- Matthew Rebholz (matrebholz@yahoo.com), October 31, 2000.

update: i got some tracing paper. it's much easier than the engineering paper. i cut the tracing paper in half to double the quantity, as i don't need the whole sheet. i made 4 frames, and tacked them to my board. i quickly took shots, and complied them into an avi, and it's very quality!! the only things i have to work on are my drawing skills (haha) and the lighting. it's a little dark when i take pictures. maybe i could edit the pictures themselves with photoshop to fix the contrasts. matt, you really should try this, because with premeire you can get more than 6 frames per second i'm pretty sure.

-- joseph (jmaniwan@vt.edu), October 31, 2000.

J-wan, what's an avi? I have read that it takes 24 frames/sec to create movement that is fluid. Do you think that is true?

-- Barb e. (Suesuesbeo@aol.com), November 01, 2000.

Thanks for the tip, Joseph, I'll look into that... lately I've decided to put the animation on hold while I write out the story in its entirety, but I'll definitely consider that for later. Barb - I've actually gotten very smooth animation at a rate of about eight or nine frames-per-second.

-- Matthew Rebholz (matrebholz@yahoo.com), November 01, 2000.

j-wan, eh. that one's new, i've never heard it before. it makes me feel powerful in a star wars kind of way, i like it. (my last name is maniwang by the way the school couldn't fit the last letter!!) an avi is a movie file format. i don't know about the 20 whatever frames, i don't doubt that it's fluid like that, but i mean it all depends on what's going on i think. cause at say 5, you can have a lot of fluidity but slow motion or something. right now with the 4 frames i have i did 20 fps i think, and it was ok, but then i did about 30 i think just to try, and it was a lot smoother.

-- joseph (jmaniwan@vt.edu), November 01, 2000.

I happen to be a professional animator and it is scientifically proven that the brain can no longer process individual frames at 24 frames per second.

-- Daniel (danielstewart7@hotmail.com), September 05, 2003.