Final Project - John Perazza

For my final project, I decided to write, animate, and produce a cartoon fight sequence in Macromedia Flash. To view a clip, click here.

The fight is between two original characters: Satan (the bad guy with the black tank-top) and Mike (the guy with the red hair). Both of the characters have the upper hand at certain points of the fight.


There are two "spectator" characters added to show reactions to the events. The girl's name is Emily and she is mostly horrified by the violence going on. The weird-looking football player's name is Big Mules and he is rooting for Mike.
I followed this process for creating this scene. Here are the stages:
It took me over two weeks to complete the animation, doing about 8% a night. In flash, I used standard keyframe animation for the most part, but also used motion tweening and lighting effects.

I would start by drawing the body movement, color it in, and attach the heads. I had about 4 different head shapes for each character: Front view, quarter-turn, side view, and back. I would adjust the eye and mouth expression to capture the emotion of the particular sequence.

The backgrounds were originally drawn in flash, but I compressed them to JPEG files in order to make the video run smoother.


Every now and then, there were lighting effects used when the characters displayed a power aura or ran very fast. There were tint effects to aid me in doing this, as well as alpha alteration.


After all the sound was recorded, I split each sound effect and voice sequence into separate wave files. I created 3 layers for the characters' voices, 3 layers for the sound effects, a layer for ambience, and a layer for the music soundtrack. Often I would have to equalize and add delay effects to the impact noises to make them more prominent.

Although I have experience with cartoon animation, this was the single most difficult work I've ever had to do. In order to keep the motion fluid, there were many keyframes that had to be drawn. I took as many shortcuts as I could without degrading the quality of the video.

Overall, I am happy with the way this turned out. If I had more time, I would add more shadow effects, more detailed power auras, and perhaps add more sequences.

For more of my cartoons, go to:
www.erikthejuiceman.com
WARNING: Contains foul language and crude, weird, and random "humor."