8mm Forum: how to make a 8mm cartoon

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Posted by Austin Holcomb (Member # 2507) on April 01, 2011, 04:10 AM:

ok i was gonna do hand drawn animation and make a cartoon but how do you get that on film

Posted by Osi Osgood (Member # 424) on April 01, 2011, 10:50 AM:

Very good question Austin ...

You need to make sure of two things first off, and they are most important ...

1. What is the focal point of your camera?

That is, how close to the paper or cel can your camera come? Some of the more cheap cameras do not allow you to get too close to your source.

2. Does your cameras have a frame by frame function?

That is, does your camer allow for you to take one frame at a time?

What I would suggest (as I have personally had trial and error and success with this in the past) ...

1. Make your animation drawings (if on paper) on sheets the size of your average copy or typewriter paper. I once did a film on 3X5 cards, and it was a little too small, and all the animation was quite fuzzy/blurry. That was so frustrating.

2. When you prepare your animation, be sure to use a dark ink line, and perhaps even slightly thicker than you might think is normal.

This is because, even though modern super 8 film is pretty darned sharp, (well it has always been fairly sharp) it is not, however, 16MM or 35MM. So, in order to make sure that the animation shows up on screen, a thicker ink line is a good idea.

3. Use proper lighting. Many super 8 cameras will have some form of light meter to them and make sure that those pages or cels have proper lighting.

Being that you are wanting to do animation, (whether stop motion or classical drawn animation), you probably already know the number of frames per second (which usually comes to between 12 to 24 fps, as in Disney animation, or 12 to as low as 4 fps for TV animation).

Posted by Steve Klare (Member # 12) on April 01, 2011, 02:42 PM:

What you need:

Patience, patience, patience....

I did an animated title where all that happened was the lightly pencilled in lettering was gradually darkened with a felt tip marker so that the title "wrote itself" in.

-must have taken an hour to do two words!

Posted by Claus Harding (Member # 702) on April 01, 2011, 04:58 PM:

In addition to "patience, patience, patience" you need:

AN EASY-TO-REFERENCE NOTEPAD WITH EACH FRAME MARKED (HASH MARKS ARE GOOD) FOR EVERY EXPOSURE YOU TAKE. You need to know how many seconds (or fractions of seconds of film) you've shot.

A STURDY TRIPOD AND A STURDY TABLE. Once you start a scene, you finish it, and any motion of camera or table in-between means you start over.

RELIABLE LIGHTS. Lamps that cast a steady, consistent glow, with good bulbs. If a bulb blows mid-scene, exactly like with the bumped-shot scenario: you start the scene over.

NO DISTRACTIONS. No cellphones, no e-mails, no pets, no music, no loved ones around. The animator is a lonely soul :-)

Good luck with it; it is a demanding art, but the result can be one of a kind.

Claus.

Posted by Osi Osgood (Member # 424) on April 02, 2011, 12:54 PM:

Great advice Claus ...

I was so annoyed when I did my first animation on Super 8. I had made a whole two minute animated film of "STAR WARS vs. Battlestar Galactica" where I had "Cylon Raiders" attacking a "Star Destroyer" (cuz back then, when I was young teenager, I thought it natural that both films should inhabit the same universe). The Star Destoyer sends out Tie Fighters and blows the Cylon's away!

But i drew it too damned small, and so it was all a blur! It's been 30 years since I drew that film and I sure with that I had those couple hundred colored and animated 3X5 cards, because I could probably rephotograph them with my 8mm digital recorder, Old video camera but pretty good.

Posted by Claus Harding (Member # 702) on April 02, 2011, 03:16 PM:

Osi,

Do you still have the film?

Claus.

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