Just A Roach & His Food

[APC]

This is the first scene I have ever animated. I have spent most of my time designing and rigging characters, while giving them intricate smart bone actions for 360-degree turns.

I am pretty pleased with the results. It was a great teaching experience, as I had to devise some workarounds for some of the effects I needed, such as getting the roach to stick to the lamp chord after flying in.

[Little Yamori]

This is really well done, especially for your first work. Very impressive. Did you do all the sounds yourself too? They fit in nicely

[APC]

Thanks for the compliments!

The sound effects I got from freeSFX.co.uk. The voices are mine. I'm a little upset about the render quality, though.

Once I rendered it, I brought it into iMove and synched the sound to the animation. I know I should have done that in reverse, but I'm curious to know what are some good formats and render types (mpeg vs H.264) when uploading animation to an editing program. I would have to combine all my finalized scenes together anyway and export in a separate program.

[Little Yamori]

Right now I use Mpeg (.mov) format and insert the animation scenes one by one into Windows Live Movie Maker. I render the dialog with the animation, but play around with other sounds on a project by project basis sometimes mixing audio tracks in Adobe soundbooth and saving as a single wav file. Windows Movie Maker only allows for one additional Audio file for the entire completed animation, so one approach is to render the dialog with the animation in AS, but add background ambience etc as the 1 audio file if you give Movie Maker a try. Sorry I don't know about the other editing software out there. If your working in AS Pro, you should have a fair amount of audio track layers available though

[Hentron]

That was great. When the guy said, "Hey! Who ate my-" I thought he was going to say "chip," singular. As if he had left one out for later, or perhaps he has a mental catalog of the location of every single piece of inconsequential bit of debris in his house.

[Danimal]

This looks good and the roach's scream of delight was absolutely wonderful.

Don't roaches tend to scurry away from light though?

[SeaShy]

Yes, roaches typically run when you turn the light on. It usually takes a big change in their environment to get them to come out in daylight.

That video was good. You must live in Florida to know that roaches can actually fly. They flew out of a tree once towards us coming out of a movie theatre in St Augustine. Ugh! Talk about a scream and not one of delight.

You know that PineSol is a faster killer of roaches than regular roach spray? At least in my trials. So mop your floor with PineSol. Use Borax strewn in their paths too. In winter, don't use central heating but those oil filled portable radiators, especially in apartments as they'll move next door and you'll still get some radiated heat from your neighbors heating their apartments.

[slowtiger]

Really well done! There's a lot to like here:
- character design
- sounds
- overall composition - lamp and window shadow are enough to create a whole environment
- interesting movements
- timing - it's just about right
I especially like how you introduce your character, by showing him just a bit in the corners, then out of frame again, then crossing that window shadow which makes clear this is a wall, and so on. Each element has a function, there's nothing unnecessary here.

[Yosemite Sam]

Wow, this was very well animated. Can't wait to see more!