What exactly is a motion comic supposed to look like?

benflintoff

Ok Ive watched various motion comics on Youtube, most of them see to be watchmen comics.

I have an assignment in college to create a motion comic. And to be honest this is absolutely out of my depths by the looks of things.

Can anyone suggest a simple way to create a motion comic, like the most simple form of motion comic.
I will need to draw it on Photoshop (thats all I have at home) & edit it in Flash if I have to at college.

Fysh

benflintoff wrote: »

Ok Ive watched various motion comics on Youtube, most of them see to be watchmen comics.

I have an assignment in college to create a motion comic. And to be honest this is absolutely out of my depths by the looks of things.

Can anyone suggest a simple way to create a motion comic, like the most simple form of motion comic.
I will need to draw it on Photoshop (thats all I have at home) & edit it in Flash if I have to at college.

Have a look at Bob Byrne's Stock Car Ninja. I made a motion comic of it (see here) using only Photoshop CS and ImageReady.

Basically, you turn each panel of the comic into a layer in Photoshop, then move those layers into ImageReady and use the Tween function to handle the transitions between them.

It's important to note that this won't give you anything which explores what you can do with motion comics as a medium - you won't be able to add sound, or any significant amount of animation, for example. You may get a project out of it, but you won't have shown that you've tried to get to grips with the possibilities of the medium.

Ridley

Fysh wrote: »

Have a look at Bob Byrne's Stock Car Ninja. I made a motion comic of it (see here) using only Photoshop CS and ImageReady.

Basically, you turn each panel of the comic into a layer in Photoshop, then move those layers into ImageReady and use the Tween function to handle the transitions between them.

It's important to note that this won't give you anything which explores what you can do with motion comics as a medium - you won't be able to add sound, or any significant amount of animation, for example. You may get a project out of it, but you won't have shown that you've tried to get to grips with the possibilities of the medium.

You could do that in Flash though. Break down parts of the panel into layers instead of 'just' the whole thing.

Say you want a guy knocking on a door:
One layer is the background.
Next one up is the arm movement with a motion tween.
Then put in the rest of body which doesn't need to move over that (and helps disguise the join).
Then you could place in the comic's knocking sound effect along with the actual sound at the right moment.

For something that basic, it's not so much difficult as it time consuming.

Fysh

Ridley wrote: »

You could do that in Flash though. Break down parts of the panel into layers instead of 'just' the whole thing.

Say you want a guy knocking on a door:
One layer is the background.
Next one up is the arm movement with a motion tween.
Then put in the rest of body which doesn't need to move over that (and helps disguise the join).
Then you could place in the comic's knocking sound effect along with the actual sound at the right moment.

For something that basic, it's not so much difficult as it time consuming.

Flash is definitely the better tool for the job, there's no argument about that. I was only mentioning the photoshop-imageready thing as an option if the OP is stuck for time and doesn't have a chance to get to grips with Flash before the project is due.

The smarter way to do it is to get to grips with Flash sooner rather than later, I would think.