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Comics with animation

marblemarble Posts: 7,500
in The Commons

In the past I have made comics from the images I produce in DAZ Studio. I use a Mac App called Comic Life 3 which produces comic layouts easily and effectively.

It occurred to me recently that I would like to use mixed media in a comic - mostly 2D panels but with animated inserts (e.g. animated GIF or .mov files). Has anyone any experience in this area? I'm wondering if I could do it in presentation software like Keynote (Mac) or Powerpoint (Microsoft).

Comments

  • SnowSultanSnowSultan Posts: 3,774

    There are a number of programs you can use actually. Smith Micro makes one called MotionArtist (I've heard mixed reviews but it's fairly cheap) and Madefire can also do it (and I think that's free). After Effects gives you ultimate control, but it's part of the Adobe Creative Cloud and definitely requires some serious learning. Search for "creating motion comics" and you may find other methods that can work for you.

  • marblemarble Posts: 7,500

    Thank you. I came across Madefire during my searches but thought it was an online only app. I don't like uploading my work to the cloud - would rather do it on my local computer. Looking again at their website there is something called Motion Book Tool but absolutely no description about how it works - just a registration form to fill in if you click on anything.

    I'll take a look at MotionArtist.

  • KA1KA1 Posts: 1,012
    MotionArtist is the program I'm using for mine, I'm currently putting a trailer together with it and everything I've wanted to be able to do up to now has been achievable with it, it seems quite flexible and can export as html if you wanted to have interactive elements to it rather than the straight movie export.
  • marblemarble Posts: 7,500

    Having read a review of MotionArtist, I'm not sure it is what I'm looking for. I don't need to animate any images, text, panels, etc. - what I need to do is embed a video clip alongside static 2D image panels. The only time I have seen this kind of mixed media is in presentation slide shows which can show a series of stills and movie clips. However, that series is one slide at a time. I want to have 2D images in panels as well as, perhaps, an animated gif in one of the panels. 

    I hope that makes sense.

     

     

     

     

     

  • algovincianalgovincian Posts: 2,664
    marble said:

    Having read a review of MotionArtist, I'm not sure it is what I'm looking for. I don't need to animate any images, text, panels, etc. - what I need to do is embed a video clip alongside static 2D image panels. The only time I have seen this kind of mixed media is in presentation slide shows which can show a series of stills and movie clips. However, that series is one slide at a time. I want to have 2D images in panels as well as, perhaps, an animated gif in one of the panels. 

    I hope that makes sense.

    One other thing you might look into (if you're comfortable with scripting) is Unity. I haven't used it recently, but a version or 2 ago they started offering many 2D specific sprite tools, and in general it offers platform independence (pc, mac, web, mobile devices, etc.), complete control (with the trade-off of complexity), etc.

    - Greg

  • marblemarble Posts: 7,500

    I'm looking at iMovie on my iMac ... something I have never really used in the 4 years I've had a Mac. It looks like it might create a mixed media show although that wasn't really what I envisaged in the first place. I imagined a simple 2D comic with panels - some of which contained animated gifs instead of static 2d images.

  • KA1KA1 Posts: 1,012
    In motionartist I have a static comic panel in a station control room with an animation on one of the control screen's for what they are looking at. Essentially you can have panels within panels so I have the animation running on a panel I created to fit the monitor screen they are watching in that panel .... Reading that back I'm not sure it made sense! Other sections I use panels (as layers) loaded with a sequence of images for example moving the space ships around that are shooting lasers at each other with a large panel in the background as the starfield.
  • marblemarble Posts: 7,500
    KA1 said:
    ...  I have the animation running on a panel I created to fit the monitor screen they are watching in that panel .... 

    Yes ... this is the kind of thing I mean. I'll take another look at it, thanks.

  • KA1KA1 Posts: 1,012
    I have just looked and .gif isn't a supported format, they suggest breaking a gif into individual png images and importing into a panel as an image sequence, this is then easily made to animate using the tools provided (as shown in one of the tutorials on their website!) It does sound like it'd do exactly what you need it to, might be worth checking out the tutorials and then you can always try the demo before taking the plunge as well!
  • marblemarble Posts: 7,500

    Well, the animations would be made by DAZ Studio so I usually do save them as image series then process them into various video formats. I would just leave them as an image series in this case.

    I'll download the demo but I'm looking for a good price. It seems it was on sale at various times with a big discount but Smith Micro have it at full price right now.

  • KA1KA1 Posts: 1,012
    Where are you based?
  • marblemarble Posts: 7,500

    I'm in the UK

     

  • marblemarble Posts: 7,500

    Best price seems to be in the Mac App Store : 23 GBP. The US App Store has it for $30.

    Full price is $50.

  • KA1KA1 Posts: 1,012

    Yeah that's about the cheapest I found it at 365 - http://www.365games.co.uk/m/pc-games/motion-artist-software-pc?utm_source=google&utm_medium=shopping&utm_campaign=google+shopping+data+feed+(10/01/2016-03:41)&gclid=CKKYhfaBr8oCFaKE2wodM4gEZA

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