Episode 5 -
of my animated cartoon series Xylus and Dexter in Space!
Here is episode 5 of my animated cartoon Xylus and Dexter in Space!
Concept
In this Episode: The boys search the castle and meet the "The Ghost".
(Related post: Xylus and Dexter in Space! "Finder's Creeper" Episode 4 - Cartoon animation)
Art
The "ghost" uses a giant ray gun in this episode. The gun is a drawing that was based on an old toy that I have from the Mars Attacks! movie. The toy gun is called the Martian Brain Disintegrator.
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| Mars Attacks! Martian Brain Disintegrator Ray Gun Toy |
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| Ray gun artwork screenshot from this cartoon |
I also started drawing the backgrounds in the animation software using a Wacom tablet instead of inking them on paper and scanning them.
I had not really captured the grit of drawn backgrounds yet doing this. I learned from this episode that I needed to work on how to translate the detail from the drawn backgrounds to computer-only drawings.
The characters themselves are still being drawn and scanned from ink on paper though.
Animation
There's a lot of walking and running in this episode without dialog then it occurred to me...
How was I going to know when the characters should be doing something without the dialog?
Here is what I decided to do.
I put the audio I recorded for the episode in a video editing program that I use called KDENLive. Then I took the storyboard scenes I penciled and imported them into the video editor.
From there I arranged those sketches in the editor, switching them around to work out the timing with the audio.
Here is one of the storyboards with the drawings of the running scenes
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| Storyboard drawings |
Then I took that video and added it to the animation software.
In the animation software, I used that video as a guide for the character drawings. When I was done I deleted the reference video from the animation software.
TV Commercial Joke
The episode was actually shorter than the usual 2 min episode I make so at the end I added a tribute to the old Flinstones TV commercials for Winston Cigarettes they used to play during the show when it was first on television.
And here is a screenshot of the commercial for whiskey and cigarettes I made for the end of this cartoon episode.
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| Xylus and Dexter commercial spoof screenshot |
Audio
As I said before, with all the running and walking in this cartoon, the audio in the episode was mostly foley sounds. So I spent a lot of time looking for sound effects to use.
When I was done animating I added a few more sound effects for random character reactions too when I saw that some of the parts needed it.
Next time: Watch Episode 6 "Mirror, mirror"
Check out the previous episode 4 "Finder's Creeper" here
https://www.tomrayswebsite.com/2021/11/xylus-and-dexter-in-space-finders.html