EDIT: The “Save Me Plz” video picture book described in this entry in now available at YouTube.
For a long time now — over two years — I’ve been thinking that it would be cool to turn one of my short stories into a sort of “video picture book,” like the show Reading Rainbow, if anyone remembers that. Not really animated, but sort of a slideshow to accompany an audio reading, with a new image that pops up every so often. Then I could post my stories on YouTube. But I didn’t know what sort of software I would use, and I figured that even to do a short story would take weeks, so I never got around to it. But recently it occurred to me that I wouldn’t even have to do a whole short story. I could just do the opening scene, to pique people’s interest, and then if they liked that first scene then maybe they’d go and read the story or listen to a podcast of it. So two days ago I decided to quit waffling, and I just downloaded the first free animation program that came up in Google, and taught myself to use it. I did the first scene of “Save Me Plz,” which takes up about three minutes in audio, and which took about thirty hours to render as a pseudo-animated cartoon. Man, animation is hard work. I can’t imagine how long it would take to actually make the characters, you know, move. I don’t have any special art equipment — heck, I don’t even have a mouse — so the artwork is necessarily pretty basic, but I think it looks pretty good. (Incidentally, drawing spiders is really hard. Seriously, try it.) The whole thing is basically done now. I’m waiting on a few things before I can post it, but here’s a sample of the artwork:
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