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Clicking on the ad on the far right, does not put you on any lists or sends you anything you don't want, but it will send us some support and will let us know you do like us!

Did you that before Dr Suess wrote children stories, he was an advertising cartoonist.

Click on the ad above to see more advertising from decades ago... 

 As a kid, I grew up on watching lots of TV commercials and like you, advertising theme songs and jingles have stuck in my head. Today, I hardly ever watch TV, but those advertising slogans are still in there. Youtube is the new TV and I see more new and old things on it with commercials you can skip when they allow it. And speaking of commercials.

One thing I don't miss were the TV ads for cigarettes. I'm not sure when they stopped, but here are a few I recently rediscovered...

 

I'm glad I didn't see my favorite cartoon show doing this...

Most commericals use to be one minute in length and over the years they shrank down to 30 seconds or 15 seconds as the audience attention spans decreased as well. The next modern commercial will be know as " vines". Youtube offspring of hyper fast humor set up and payoffs in 7 seconds. My kids watch them endlessly and I have a feeling the future advertisers are either already looking at this format or soon will be. 

Which brings us to subliminal advertising which is a deceptive business practice by the Federal Trade Commission. It has been used in filmmaking to enhance the storytelling as well as to be used in effects and animation. Here's a better article on the subject. And I have feeling we might be seeing more subliminal advertising in "Vines" or other shorten formats on the net or maybe we won't know.

And clickspeaking of click ad subliminal advertising click ad, be sure to click click it on the click ad on the right. My apologies click ad if its an clickad for cigarettes.

Thank you to the person in Brunei, who clicked on the ad and gave me 0.12 cents!

 

 Click it if you learned something new or leave a comment below     .

Thanks,

Jimr

  

Animatics 101

An animatic is a rough animated preview of your storyboard to see the timing and how your animated scenes will cut together. Before you can put together an animatic, you need to have a storyboard that tells your story visually in a correct cinematic format.

Animatics can be used to test commercials before they are made into live action or animation to see if a test audience responses to it or not. They can be used in Feature films in the form of Pre-Vis sequences allowing a Director to pre-plan his shots to see if a sequence will cut together before shooting the real thing. And especially for animation students, to help them figure out the timing of their storyboards and figure out if the scenes will work or need to be revised.

Animatics don't have to be fancy. They just have to be used to make sure each scene has enough time to be shown to keep the story flowing along. If the pacing is off, either too fast or too slow, those panels must be re-timed and a new animatic must be re-edited.

The animatics below had several revisions in the beginning, so don't think by simply making an animatic of your storyboard that it will turn out perfect on the first try. Most of the time you are trying to figure out not only the timing of each panel, but the pacing of the scenes. Do they begin to get faster? This is a way to create tension in a scene, especially with an action scene. Or do they slow down the pace, by showing a scene longer, followed by another one.

Here are two versions of the same animatic where you can see a revision was made to help present the story more clearly. (Please let me know if you can view the previews below or if you see nothing.)

arcillaanimatic1.0 from Toondini on Vimeo.

  

Andrew Arcilla's project shows a ghost attempting to scare a sleeping child who wakes up mad at the ghost, not scared. The ghost is now scared of the child and tries to escape as the child is seen about to throw a pillow. As the ghost is fleeing to a door that is stuck shut, we cut back to the kid with the pillow, then back to the ghost's struggle with the door.

arcillaanimatic2.0 from Toondini on Vimeo.

In this version, the cutaway to the kid with the pillow has been removed, to keep the focus on the ghost's frantic struggle to get through the door. By removing this cutaway, the pillow becomes a surprise when we see it from the ghost's point of view.

Here's another animatic by Yongkang Wu. which has a few things in it which can be revised, but all in all it works pretty good so far... Its a work in progress. Do you understand what is happening in this animatic?

Yongkang_ Final Animatic from Toondini on Vimeo.

Please let me know if you can't view this and I will fix the problem before I continue.