Hola enemigos! Para español, haga clic en la descripción. Everyone else, onward with
the video and pretend that didn't happen.
You’ve stumbled right into another episode of Scribble Kibble, a weekly show about animation
made by an animator. This time I want to go back and revisit the animations I watched
when I had no idea it was possible for a normal person (yeah okay) like me to make videos.
This is nostalgic for me. It’s… when you go back and you look at something that inspired
you, and you look at what you can do today and you think, "Wow. I could make that now."
It’s… makes it not as special as it used to be.
Yeesh. Let’s not go there. Instead, let’s go to CCC. Triple C. Should I call it triple
C? The city of opportunities. The stark raving mad world created by Vinnie Veritas.
I’ll give you a foothold in CCC. Triple C? I don't... let's go with CCC. Triple C
sounds weird. Before I cut you loose. I'll give you a foothold in it. Yeah, whatever!
I'll help you figure the world out. So every character in the background of Vinnie’s
comics and animations is different. A lot of them have weird markings, odd weapons,
unusual hair, cool accessories, unique powers - because CCC is a city made up of all of
Vinnie’s ideas and abandoned concepts thrown together in one place. Imagine a city where
all the main characters from everything everywhere ever go. That's basically what it's like.
I actually can’t decide which animation to have you watch, so let’s do it this way.
The one I’m going to talk about is Gravitaxis... BUT these are my other picks. Hoy te amo is
a story about a treasure hunter. Papalote is a funny sequence about a guy who flies
a kite. And Rush 2 is an action-packed video that shows everyday life in CCC.
So pick what you feel like watching and I'll see you in a second.
Well, not a second. If it were a second that would be a very short animation. Yeah, Vinnie's
animations are actually pretty long. It's... it's really impressive. [laughs]
Ten years ago this was the top crop of internet animation. There were a lot less people making
internet cartoons, and it was harder to find them because there weren’t many places that
collected videos. Vinnie couldn’t even upload his first cartoons to YouTube because it didn’t
exist!
Gravitaxis is his most recent CCC-related animation. What stands out about it is the
fact that it’s animated backwards. Oh sure, you think, so he just animated it and then
played backwards - no! He pictured what the movement should look like if it were in reverse
and then animated it. I know this because the original video is pure Flash, a good ol’
.swf file. Flash has no option to reverse a video, so if you wanted to play something
backwards you would have to either write an ActionScript code to do it or individually
move all 8,088 pictures the animation is made out of so they are in backwards order.
Plus, some of the movements are weird looking if you play the animation forward. So while
I think some of the sequences were animated normally and then the frames were moved around
to be reversed, for the most part the animation was planned and drawn backwards. Wow!
The backwards theme goes really well with the video’s story, since it’s about the
character Icaro and his gravity reversing shoes. At the end of the video - which is
the beginning of the story - the guards have caught him with a mass of blue packets that
are a fictional drug called “Full Color CCC.” As Icaro falls up, he throws the packets
down all over the town, and later he sprays the drug in a guard’s eye and that's what
causes the rainbow effect we see here. Icarus - I mean Icaro - then plummets to the ground.
What we see at the beginning of the video, then, is the moment before impact.
I’ll leave you to think about that one.
The animation itself is a mix of frame-by-frame and tweens. In other words, every time you
see the character it’s a new drawing, but a lot of times that character is made of pieces
that can be moved, aka tweened. This shot here, the arms and the hair are separate pieces
from the body. That's why the hair can be pushed around to look flowy, and the arm can
move up faster without affecting the body drawing. It gives it more life than a rigid
drawing stuck in one position, but it saves the animator a bunch of time because they
only have to draw the character once for that shot. After the pieces are drawn, the animator
just tells them to move from one spot to another over a period of time. That’s called a tween.
The arm moving here is a tween. (2:42) The arm moving here is frame-by-frame. (2:44)
Haha, sorry, I’m having a moment where at this point I’ve watched the animation so
many times to make this video for you, and I’m remembering just how awesome it is after
all these years. The timing and emotion are synced so well with the music. The music goes
up, the character falls up, the music calms down, we see the character falling out of
the world and into the vast expanse of space. Such good scene selection to tell the story.
Vinnie takes on some pretty challenging animation. When the guard has Icaro by the sleeve, the
two are rotating, so the size of everything keeps changing as it gets closer or farther
from our point of view. You have to have a good sense for how something looks from every
angle to animate this right. Same deal over here, with an even more difficult animation.
The camera moves all the way around the cart. At the same time it starts above the cart
at dice man’s head, moves down below the cart, and then comes up to see inside it.
So the camera is moving on this downward upward spiral thing. Since you can’t just tell
a camera to do that on a 2D animation, you really have to have a sense of dimensional
space to pull it off as you are drawing each picture in that animation.
So much rotating, aaahh! This animation is- This is animating without fear! No fear that
it might not turn out perfect, no fear that it you can’t do it, only a desire to make
what is in your mind’s eye come to life! You want it to rotate? You DO it! No whining!
Aye, I was going to talk about how the art used to look amazing to me and now since I
could animate it myself, it seems dull and there are places where the animation could
have been improved, places where the colors didn’t fill correctly because of the close
gap tool, but you know what! No! This is good animation! I like it!
And you know what else I like? There are all these little details in the backgrounds. Look,
tic-tac-toe, a clock with 5 hands, a broken plunger, a kite is stuck here , cactus burgers
- yeah, that's awesome cactus burgers - a piano key roof.
This is the type of detail in Vinnie’s artwork.
That’s the city of CCC. If you want to read the comic and see more of Vinnie Veritas’
animations, all of those materials are below! There’s animated skits, great music like
Spanish Flea, an animated cartoon series called Astromiau… oh… oh dear. Uh, come back
next week. I’ll catch you on the flip sideeeee!