Moho Forum

I would like to animate a YouTube clip of Gene Kelly in Singing in the rain to redo as a political cartoon against what is called "The Rain Tax" in Houston.
My idea was to turn the clip into a cartoon like set of images, put a new head on Gene Kelly and then clone a second, female figure to dance with him. I would then put in a new vocal track.
The problem with this great idea is that I have no idea how to do it.
It would be nice to find an animator here in Houston with similar political views that might take this project on as project.
In the meantime, I will download Anime Studio and see what I can figure out. Any advice would be appreciated.

Well, - cheat?

Since everybody should know that scene, you don't have to stick to it slavishly. Just create enough of the set to be recognizable - street, boardwalk, lamp post, gutter. And rain. Do a good rain.

Then create your characters - they don't have to be realistic, they don't even need legs. Just enough anatomy as you need to make your point. (Act out the whole scene with a sock puppet to get the idea.)

Have you tried the tracking feature? At the very least this would enable you to stick another head on Gene (would this be gene therapy?) and get it to follow the great man around.

jahnocli wrote:would this be gene therapy?

only if you spliced it together

SvenFoster wrote:

jahnocli wrote:would this be gene therapy?

only if you spliced it together

Heh heh! We'll have to stop meeting like this...

Your gene therapy sounds like a great idea, but I just opened "the box" today and I tried to import the .mp4 movie and got some box on the screen and tried to import a .jpg head and couldn't figure out where to do that. The help feature doesn't really get me there. I can see, theoretically, that your idea would be the easiest path: Import the movie, put the head on the first frame and track it. If I want a second character, I can cartoon it and let it fill various intervals if I cannot track Gene's boy with an offset. But how to do any of these things escapes me entirely.

There's a complete breakdown of the process in the link I gave you.

Sorry, I didn't see the link.
I have imported the film and set the scale.
I have read about tracking points and think I understand that.
But all I have on myscreen is a graphic white box to represent the video and a red box which presumeably shows the positi0n of the video (which needs to be enlarged).
But I have pushed many buttons and looked through the manual and I cannot see how to make the move run so I can select tracking point.
Sorry to be so dense, but I am an absolute novice.
Thanks

OK, Stephen, this is as far as I go. I only have an old copy of Anime Studio (ver. 5.6). I try to keep up with new features as they are introduced, though, which is why I knew enough to recommend the tracking feature...I can't do any more.

Hey Stephan, are you saying that the movie doesn't run when you press play? What format are you using? What version of AS do you have? DEBUT or PRO? 7 or 8? Maybe you could upload a 10 second clip of the movie in the format that you got to a file sharing site so we can check it out.

i've not worked with video in AS much but I expect you should see the actual frames which is where the confusion lies... it probably doesnt support the mp4 video format - convert it to QT (google how to do that, i think there are websites that do it too) then you should see the frames and take the tracking from there.

ASP8 is supposed to support mp4. format.

video codecs are a mineshaft... no - minefield Maybe there's 'something' about that particular video that it doesn't like, or maybe mp4s are 'supported' but you can't see the frame by frame? either way, if it were me, first thing i'd do is try a different video format.

I use a good video converter for this reason I prefer to work with Quicktime codec

http://www.wondershare.com/

Anright, I converted to .avi, viewed the avi file, imported movie and the movie is now on layer 3. I think I have to move the layer onto the time line. If the limitation is two minuted, I'd better cut the movie to size.
All that appears in the main screen is a small cartoon face box. I need to open the image to attempt to do tracking.
What do I do?