Animating with PAP

Hello,

Let's say goodbye to January and welcome the warm February. Jogja is getting warmer, in fact. I've been waiting for rainy days since Sunday it poured lightly only on midnight for about 15 minutes. The rest were warm and humid hours, our fan in the studio set on the maximum speed and I feel better inside the Transjogja bus, they provide cool breezed air-conditioner and nice-warm seats as well.

I'd like to write a bit about this handy software we were using on Rara and The Ricketies, PAP. Plastic-Animation-Paper version 4.0. Sincerely, it's handy. Let's talk about it slowly, shall we?

Get it from and put it on

You may type 'plastic animation paper' on the search engines you trust and you'll be directed to this link. We could freely download the PAP from the site and install it without any annoying demands or reminders to buy something from them. A very huuuge thanks to the Danish company that made it for free :D ...

It doesn't need expensive requirements for the hardwares. My slow Brazos 1,65Ghz-2GB memory-dedicated HD6470M can do the job. It runs on Win2000/XP (does on Win7 as well) or Linux, yet I don't know the installation proccess for the latter. Also, you'd need a drawing tablet to draw: wacom, genius pen tablet, etc.

The installation is quite fast: get a coffee, sip it, and put the mug back where it used to, and your installation is done. It takes only 15mb of your hard drive.

User interface

It didn't take a very long time for me to learn tools and how-to. My colleague told me the basic instruments and I suppose we all can find the how-to by ourselves. PAP site also provides tutorials, though I've never visited it since I first used this software *chuckle.

Let's see, sketches, cleaning-ups, cut-copy-paste, rotate the canvas, set frame rate, layers, etc. all you can get for a hand-drawn animation.

Output

This step is the most boring and tiresome of the whole thing. But I think we would expect the same fate in hand-drawn during the exporting or scanning outlines, colorings, composing in the compose softwares, etc.

The native filetype for PAP is in .lap or .pap and there are 7 types of images we could save it to: png, bmp, tif, jpeg, tga, gif, and psd, and 2 types of movies: avi-cinepak and avi-divx. 

I've been exporting our works into .png images then put the colorings by GIMP 2.6.11. Sometimes we used PAP's .avi-cinepak outputs to do the line tests and see if they were good enough before switched them to GIMP. 

Shortly, PAP worth inside your side-pocket if you were into hand-drawn or traditional animation. And I think these are all I can recall from our works with PAPv4.0 in Rara and The Ricketies. Would I remember something, I'll make sure it's posted.

Example video is here :D

enjoy!

Leyak and Lost Lollipop Snapshots #2

Yes! Here you go... ^__^

The Snapshots #1

Hello, there.
About three months has passed since our wujudkan.com last day campaign for Rara and The Ricketies series. We were working hard to make at least one serie, we hope you all enjoy it well when we upload it on the online video sites (vimeo and youtube, respectively).

But not yet. Save your curiosity for later, we'd like to screen it first on some festivals before publicly released on the net :D. In the mean time, be free to enjoy 'Leyak and Lost Lollipop's screenshots as shown below...

We also want to thank you to some people who gave their pledge for our project at wujudkan.com. Though it wasn't work well, at least this is something we can give to show our gratitude.
Of whose shares in social media were widely recognized:
Johan Tri Handoyo (hello, Cimol! :D )
Hana LK
Cak Waw
Andreas Hery Saputro and his Kolam Bebek
Hizaro
Cak Ikin for your Surabaya AnimNation festivals

Whose pledges in wujudkan.com gave us spirit to keep moving:
Johan Tri, Hana LK, Andreas Hery Saputro, Ranti, Aceto, Firmansyah, Meiske Taurisia, Ahmad Syarifuddin, Sylke Febrina Laucereno, aditia.ap@gmail, tazx@xoopop, hasannuh@gmail, fitrimitsuharu@gmail, erwinstp@gmail, elangelangelang@gmail

I don't understand why I couldn't upload more than 6 images at once -__-' ...

A Report

Miss Delia is teaching the class again after long time hiatus. I like the story around her and her class and I think there are a lot of things will show up :D ...

Do I put the term 'prosetry' - prose and poetry - correctly? We call it as 'fiksimini' - short/small fiction - in Indonesia. Some kind of way to tell something big or -more often- hillarious with a very limited words.

Oh, right! That's Merida from Pixar's BRAVE.

enjoy!

Kuaci

I took this very scene when our studio had kuaci seeds for one of our snacks. I don't know the English term for this kind of snack-seeds. Ours comes from a pumpkin instead of sunflower so, I think 'sunflower seed' is actually inapropriate term as Burd says it in panel 5. But we call all of seeds snacks as 'kuaci' and I hope you know what I mean with that term.

The three of us have, actually, very different type of ways to open the seeds. And one of us had a joke about types of working people derived from the way people crunch-and-eat the kuaci seeds. He suggested three types. 

The first one is efficient people, whose seeds were opened very cleanly and the flaps are still intact. That kind of people also opens the seeds by ONLY his one hand. So, one hand - flaps are still intact - opened very cleanly. Overkill.

The second one is actually hard-worker. They want their works neat and clean but just don't know how to work smart and efficiently. Their seeds are cut in two pieces, less dirt all over the place, and often use both hands just to open one.

The last one is the noob. Their works are messy, dirt everywhere, and took longer bid hour to do something. Just like their way opening the seeds: dirts, the flaps are torn to pieces, sometimes they need to eat the whole seeds for they couldn't open the damn seeds LOL...

Which one are you? 

A Blind Chess

As Aye recalls, one night, about 2 years ago, someone came and asked Aye to play a blind chess.

Aye didn't really want to play, actually. Aye had awesome dreams to catch and wonderful job much more fun than a game of blind chess. Perhaps it wasn't because Aye despise the most of it, but more that Aye fear the game. It's full of tricks, full of both good and regretful memories, and Aye risked his dreams by playing it.

Few times The Person asked Aye to play, Aye thought, “Okay, let's see what The Person made of and how far you could buy my attention and loyalty off of my jobs and dreams.” The Person is white, Aye is black.

First moves were slow and steady. The next ones were a bit creepy. The Person moved the pieces hastily and Aye decided to take sly moves to slowly kill them, just to make The Person amused. Aye thought it was great idea to get rid the bugs off of Aye's life.

In fact it was terrible decision.

Nevertheless, Aye successfully lured The Person's bishops into Aye's traps. A white's rook also became Aye's victim. Poor pieces. Piece by piece were down and the moves were really considered carefully but the way it looked, The Person's was heavily wounded.

Aye smiled slyly. The Person's efforts would seem finally exhausted in a matter of time. In the contrary, The Person kept moving and dancing white's pieces like there was nothing else to lose. Aye despised that kind of situation and ofttimes Aye felt really uncomfortable with the way The Person moved white's pieces.

Aye also felt confused when The Person moved white's King forward, sometimes both Kings were only separated by a square. Sometimes it felt delightful when both Kings met face-to-face, yet Aye feared things in most times. Aye had chosen to keep running until white pieces were all be killed. No matter how long it took.

Until then, Aye's strategies were successfully hold the white pieces out of black King's grasp. Another white Knight was pawned and another black piece was killed protecting the black King. Yet The Person kept coming persistently. Aye didn't understand the way white's moves pattern, neither did The Person way of thinking.

One day Aye decided to grope white's territory square by square with Aye's overwhelming pieces. Aye thought it was enough to make white conceded and quit . It seemed perseverance had beaten the dirty tricks. White king was standing there with the pawns protecting its territory while black's were collapsing one by one.

2 years the game fares. No one wins, no one loses. Yet. Aye thinks The Person is exhausted, frustrated, and perhaps, furious while Aye feels really annoyed by this unfinished game. Aye thinks Aye has already known white's feelings just from seeing the way white moves. But somehow Aye still doesn't understand exactly The Person's way of thinking.

White has 4 Pawns and black has a Pawn, a Bishop, and a Knight. Aye knows black couldn't win, Aye's pawn is being intercepted by white's pawn. Both of Aye's Bishop and Knight are very agile to kill every damn white pawns but it's not enough to manage a check-mate. On the other side, white has a potential danger by running the pawns off to row 8 and become Queens. Aye knows it. Yet The Person doesn't seem to know it.

A move was made last night by white. The black has two choices: kill ALL the white pawns and see The Person devastating crush while hoping the black pawn is safe until row 1 -where Aye could exchange it to Queen- or declare a draw and play a new game. Perhaps with a different rule, for Aye thinks that the game has already bought Aye's attention off of Aye's dreams...

Happy New Year 2013

I just realize, this year is an awesome year. We passed another apocalypse and it has 4 different numbers since 1987!
I want to start this year with awesome stuff as well, so I post this short-not-awesome-Burd comic... The language is in Indonesian, I'm too lazy to translate it :D

Nevertheless, enjoy!