I’m steadily getting there with my animations for the Rhubarb Festival. For the forcing shed sequence, I’ve kept exactly to my original comic strip. I can add sound effects and lighting effects later, but for the moment, this tells the story just as I did in the booklet.
Category: cartoon
Culpeper Speaks
Take one of Culpeper’s talk about the medicinal qualities of rhubarb. Perhaps I’ll come back and re-record the voiceover and add one or two sound effects but after a weekend sorting out various technical challenges, at least I’ve got him moving and talking.
Forced Rhubarb
My latest, and simplest, animation for the Rhubarb Festival.
Buckets, pots or barrels are used to ‘force’ an earlier crop of rhubarb.
Rhuben
Let me introduce head gardener Rhuben Cushstead, a man so well-versed in all things rhubarb that you’d go to considerable efforts to avoid striking up a conversation on the subject with him, if you spotted him in the pub.
I’ve designed Rhuben to be a narrator in the opening Brief History of Rhubarb section of my animation for next month’s Rhubarb Festival. In the original comic strip, a Victorian gardener makes a brief appearance, followed by a couple of frames about the cultivation of forced rhubarb, so it made sense in my animation to have the gardener himself addressing the audience directly.
I can think of several gardeners I know who would be brilliant doing the voiceover for Rhuben, but to keep things simple, it’s going to have to be my voice. But that’s quite appropriate as whenever I record a voiceover it always sounds exactly like the kind of character ‘that you’d go to considerable efforts to avoid striking up a conversation with, if you spotted him in the pub.’
Culpeper on Rhubarb
When rhubarb arrived in Europe, it was prized as a medicine:
“It is under the dominion of Mars . . . It is good against venomous bites.”
Nicholas Culpeper, 1653
In my Rhubarb Festival animation, A Brief History of Rhubarb, herbalist Nicholas Culpeper will be giving the 17th century equivalent of a TED Talk. In the final version he’ll have his own version of a Power Point slide to point at: a scroll nailed to the wall. I’ll record a line of dialogue, so his mouth and eyes will be animated and, yes, that impressive moustache will twitch expressively too.
Marco Polo’s Rhubarb
Today’s snippet of animation: Marco Polo visit the mountains of Tangut, China, where he finds rhubarb in great abundance.
In the final version there will be some lip-synced dialogue, eye movement and some twitching of the moustache. And I won’t be able resist having the top of his hat moving a little.
Ghengis Khan’s Rhubarb
Ghengis Khan’s men bring two camel-loads of rhubarb back from China in today’s test animation. Still going through the basics, I’m adding voiceover, titles and sound effects (yes, me tapping on a cardboard box is intended to represent a camel’s footsteps).
Chinese Rhubarb Medicine
My next cartoon illustrates the use of powdered rhubarb as a medicine in China, 2,700 years ago.
Experimenting with animation, I came up with this warped out-of-register effect, which could be an appropriate way to suggest the malady affecting the over-indulgent mandarin.
Mammoth
This mammoth looks exactly like my original frame from the Short History of Rhubarb comic strip from my Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle, except that it isn’t cropped (the tips of the tusks and the mammoth’s rear end are missing in comic) and, despite the flat colours, I’ve now reformatted it in eight separate layers, so that I can animate individual features like the trunk and the eyes.
Mammoth’s Trunk
My next step in Adobe Character Animator has been to rig my drawing of the mammoth’s trunk by adding a fixed point and a movable point, joined by a series of nine ‘sticks’ which act like a string of beads, so that the movement of the trunk isn’t too shapeless and elasticated.
The background is added to the scene in just the same way as you’d add an additional character, although so far I’m not intending to add any movement to it. I can always come back and add a ripple effect to the river or have the rhubarb leaves swaying in the breeze, but so far I’m concentrating on the essential action needed to tell my story.
After Effects
I’ve added a couple of finishing touches in another Adobe program, After Effects, with a title and a snow effect. I probably won’t go for snow in the final version, but I couldn’t resist trying it out.