The purpose of this article is to tell how I did the cartoon animations for the music video of my song version of "What a Wonderful World," that was originally done by Louie Armstrong.

Of course a good starting point would be to state the obvious.  And that is that even though the characters began as hand puppets, there is not a single scene that a hand was in any of them.  Instead the puppets of course were photographed in several poses and the images used for cartoon animation.  Why these puppets?  Our three grandchildren at this time have seen these puppets.  And so these puppets, I feel, have a special family meaning. 

 The animation I used in my music video of "Wonderful World" was I admit simplistic, and more like the animation in early video games, perhaps such as Pac Man or the first Atari Games.  These were what I call two dimensional graphics, that can be done by some of us more normal humans.  And also on the information below, I will discuss how the first two dimensional games were put together, at least to an extent.

 MAIN ITEMS IN MAKING THE MUSIC VIDEO ANIMATION

There were a number of tools used to create the animation.  But perhaps the three most important ones used were:

1. A Software Cartoon Animation Studio that I wrote just for this music video

2. Software made by others that allowed me to film a portion of my computer screen, giving me 18 separate scenes to be put together later.  The software used, that is not mine, was called "Screen Movie Studio" by Mandsoft.  And yes, I did pay for it.

3. Software, in this case, Microsoft Movie Maker, part of Windows Essentials, that I used to put the 18 video scenes together with two non moving picture title pages, trim the size, combine with my one piece band music, and turn it into a single mp4.  The Microsoft Movie Maker is a good program and was free at the time I acquired it.

Of the above, two of the programs are not mine (items 2 and 3) and still should be available for download.  The first item on this list, the animation studio, that I wrote, I will discuss below.  But first I need to say a few words about how two dimensional animation works.

SOME SECRETS OF TWO DIMENSIONAL ANIMATION

I have done some of this in the past, and so I see it as simple, and perhaps some other people do as well.  But there are three parts to a simple two dimensional animation.  They are:

1. A Background - that is either totally stable or has simple movements

2. Moveable images that some people used to call "sprites" that move on that background

3. Software that listens to your controls and modifies the action and images accordingly

And of course, if not doing this for silent animation for a music video, there normally would be more items such as Sound Effects, or Music, which some of us like me just see as sound effects controlled in a given manner and timing.

A simple explanation of the above might be to relate it to a Pac Man game.  In that game, the maze is the mostly unchanging background.  The moveable images are mostly 5 important ones of Pac Man and 4 ghosts that move around on the maze "background."  And of course software listens to your commands, watches for "collisions" and changes things accordingly.

Next we need to discuss how much of video is an optical illusion

FILM AND TV AND ANIMATION TRICKS - OPTICAL ILLUSIONS

MOVING PICTURES - There really is no such thing as moving pictures.  It is an optical illusion.  What our eyes do is to take snapshots of our surroundings with what we would consider still images.  And those images are retained in our memory very briefly.  Early film makers knew this and that they did not have to have true moving images.  Early films, and perhaps still many today, therefore give our eyes 24 still frames of photos a second.  Our eyes see that as a moving picture.  Early TV in the US, 480i (interlaced), gave 30 full pictures every second.  And again, our eyes saw that as moving images.  Of course some films and TV of today use progressive scan and other techniques to get even more frames, photo images, to our eyes every second.  Animation is much the same.  Nothing is moving.  It is just that when our eyes take snapshots, we think we see movement from still images that are changing.  And of course some animation changes slower than 24 frames per second, especially two dimensional animation, and so you can really see that the motion is not smooth.

IMAGE CHANGES - Image changes also look to our eyes as animation.  For example, you might ask yourself how Pac Man turns when you go right or left or up or down?  The answer is that it does not.  Pac Man starts with at least 4 images of Pac Man stored somewhere conveniently for usage.  Then when you go up the software replaces the Pac Man image with one that has the mouth on top.  When you go right, it replaces the Pac Man image with a mouth that goes right.  And of course the same thing happens for left and down.  But, you ask, Pac Man seems to be eating?  Ah yes.  You see?  There are more than four Pac Man images.  For example when it goes right there would be a Pac Man image with the mouth open and one with the mouth closed.  The software just cycles between those two images likely several times a second to make it appear like movement and eating.  But what you are really seeing, are two images at least - if not more- that when changed back and forth rapidly look like eating.

In our program for example, there are four Wolfie Puppet images - even for just normal movement.  There is a front right, a front left, a far right facing, and a far left facing.  For Wolfie, the guitar player in the band, there are 7 Wolfie with guitar images.  The software goes through six of those in a row continuously to make Wolfie bounce up and down and also to rotate his guitar a bit in the air.  And those six images just repeat to give the appearance of animation.  The 7th Wolfie guitar image is at the end of the final band scene where he holds his guitar high at the end of the instrumental part of the song.  Sorry.  This is likely disturbing to some people who thought they were real.  Just kidding.

THE ILLUSION OF MOVEMENT - In our software program, it would appear that at times that the Wolfie and LilRed puppets are bouncing and moving to the right.  But are they?  Actually that would be inconvenient since then my screen camera would need to follow that action.  Instead Wolfie and LilRed mostly stay in the same place, except perhaps for bouncing up and down.  What is moving is the background screen, moving slowly to the right or the left.  And so for Wolfie and LilRed to go right, they face right and bounce, and the screen goes left.  And of course to go left, they face left and the background screen goes right.  But in the camera image, it would appear that Wolfie and LilRed are moving and that the camera is following them.

MORE ANIMATION ITEMS

TIMERS - Some software programs, such as the VB2010 (Microsoft Visual Basic) software we use here, allows timers.  In our animation program, we use 6 timers to control such things as how Wolfie or LilRed bounce, screen movement, flowers growing and more.  So, how do flowers grow?  Well, in VB2010 images are held in a rectangular box called a "picturebox."  If the controls in those boxes are set to "stretch image" then one full complete flower image will always be in the picturebox regardless of size.  And so, the rest perhaps becomes easy.  A timer is triggered that starts each flower picturebox at a small size, and then grows both the width and the height at the same time until the total desired size is reached.  At that point, we shut off the growth or the timer or both.  And of course, mathematics we put into software control where on the screen the objects will be each time that they grow.

STORED IMAGES FOR SPEED - Some images are stored in the program itself for fast change speed.  If the images are stored in the program then they are stored in your computer RAM which is far faster than loading them from a hard drive.  And so images of background and moveable images and more are stored.

RANDOM - Yes, of course, one does not want to just repeat things.  And so we use random generators in the VB2010 language to provide some variation.  Let us take the example of fireworks.  There are 20 different stored images.  There are 4 pictureboxes that can show one of those 20.  We use software randomize to figure out which picturebox to update and start up next - but we check to see if it is already in usage. And so we only restart a fireworks picturebox when it is done with the last one.  When a picturebox is available for another fireworks image, we use a random generator to decide which of the 20 images it will use.

CAREFUL OF "TOO MUCH" - At some point, every computer will reach its limitations, and graphics are a good way to find that out.  At one point during software programming, I found the computer programming control choking due to complaints of "memory," which did not make a lot of sense to me.  But then I found out in VB2010 it seems one should not check features of all items if you do not need it.  I was using "stretch" on all stored pictureboxes.  That seemed to disturb VB2010 since that was a great deal of image adjustment.  And so I then only use "stretch" on the 6 moveable images.  The background images and all stored images are set to "normal" so as to not cause the programming language to work too hard.  I have seen this happen in other computers and other programming language.  Once on the Commodore 64 I was trying to simulate a 3D car game.  The scenes were fine in the country when the computer only had to draw different size trees to make it look like we were passing them.  But then when I got to a city, I wanted buildings of different sizes, different heights, and differing colors.  I admit the software to randomize all of this was causing my brain difficulties of remembering all of the variables.  But the Commodore 64 came to my rescue.  It was not fast enough to do all of that drawing and variations.  So I settled to buildings of the same height and did change colors, and that was fine.  But when doing animations, or gaming software, one always has to watch when they are exceeding the abilities of their computer or programming language.  I tend to believe that "gaming" or animation can provide the highest strain on a computer and programming language, since some times, updates are huge and rapid.

ODDITIES - If in the animation business, it seems that no matter what operating system or program I use, there are always oddities to be faced.  In the Commodore 64 computers of long ago, when doing graphics, the graphics could smear if you updated the region while the screen raster was changing the screen images there at the same time.  And so you would use software to know where the raster was on your computer screen, and avoid changing the images in that region until the raster went past.  The raster of course was the light from the rear of early television and computer screens that scanned down the page and lit up the color sensors on the front of your TV screen with the images.

For the VB2010 environment, we can also see some smearing.  I think it has to do with how it handles images that have some transparency.  It is apparently trying to redraw those areas while the image is moving.  There is also the issue that moveable items that have some transparency, and all of mine do, that you have to tell VB2010 what the "parent" image is of the background such that it seems to want to know what to fill into the transparency.  Well, that leads to another issue in that I cannot overlap moveable images that have transparency since if one moveable image overlaps another, then you would really have two parent items behind it.  Another way of saying that is that you cannot overlap images that have some transparency.  But, one gets used to that.  I have worked with moving animation images in several formats.  They all have issues programmers have to work around.  And dealing with transparency seems to be one of the most difficult items for computers and programming software.  In our case, I just made the best of the smearing.  I modified speeds and images to minimize it.  And I did that by experimenting, since so far, I have not found information that tells me how to stop smearing altogether.

Now that you are a "pro" at two dimensional animation, next we show you an image of our software animation maker below.  By the way, this software animation maker is not for sale nor would it do others any good.  The software is designed for just this one video.  To use it for something else would take a rewrite.  And so, like a movie set, there are only parts that can be reused for another movie.

THE ANIMATION SOFTWARE PROGRAM SCREEN that I wrote

A description of the above.  First of all there is more blank white area to the right that I did not include in this photograph.  The screen is therefore wider than shown here.  The stage area is of course on top.  The red square around the images on the stage does not exist in my program but was put in to simulate the area perhaps used for the screen camera to record a single scene of the 18 scenes that I needed for the movie.  But basically, the above area is the stage area with the largest part being the background image.  And of course moveable images such as Wolfie and LilRed are then added in front of the background.

The bottom area are the controls and more.  To the very left side of the bottom are ten or so buttons that allow me to change the background scene.  And yes, at times I can do that even in the middle of a video scene "take" since the change is rapid. You can see choices like "Wonderful World," or "Night," or "Nursery" and the like.  Now go the center of the screen and you see round radio buttons they are called which allow you to select one at a time from a group.  There is a set of three for "Screen Move" that as you can see, allow options directly below of "Stay Still,", "Go Left," or "Go Right."  To the right of those three choices are 11 button choices going down where you can select only one at a time.  Currently, the image above shows that "Two Front Views" is selected.  These selections are for Wolfie and LilRed and moveable image control.  Those buttons set up software.  There are six possible moveable images in this program at one time.  Most often, one is the Wolfie puppet and one is the LilRed puppet.  The other four can be used for flowers, fireworks, and more, but change for each scene.  And so choosing one of those 11 radio buttons for the scene under the caption "Wolf Move" sets up the software for moveable image control.  Between those two areas, the background change buttons on the left, and the radio button controls for scenes, you will see enlarged buttons for keying the scenes.  I made these buttons large for my own benefit.  When a scene begins and the camera rolling, you want to be able to key "RUN  Wolfie and LilRed" for bouncing or whatever, and to begin screen move with the "Move Screen" button which must be keyed separately to give you time for camera controls.  And of course you see other large buttons for growing flowers, or starting the band, or fireworks, as well as the panic button "STOP -HALT."  See? easy.  No?  To the far right you see pictureboxes just set to normal so they do not consume much software and overhead thought.  And they hold the background images, Wolfie and LilRed images, and the other images for rapid change.  As we said above, if images are stored in this program, then they are fast change out since they are stored in your computer RAM.  If you had to load from disk, then image change would be slower.  And I for one, do not like slow.  I like the speed.

Why is there more white unused area to the right of the screen image you see?  Well, as we said somewhere above, when it appears Wolfie and LilRed are moving, they are not.  They stand still near the center of the camera image (red box illustrated in the image) while the background goes right or left.  And so we need some blank space each side for the background to go when it is going right.  When the background is going left, you would probably guess that the background starts furthest right to give an open area of white for it to go left.  Yes, that is correct.  And so going left or going right the camera red scene record area (illustrated by the red rectangle in the image) would be different, but would stay the same for the duration of that one scene of 18.

So how to use this to make a movie?  Well, before I did my shooting, I did a script in Excel with multiple columns.  In one column I put the scene that I would need.  Then while listening to the song over and over, in another column I decided the rough amount of time in seconds for each scene.  Another column numbers the scene.  And of course columns for comments as well as areas to ensure all added up correctly.  Then we were ready to shoot.  And I shot the scenes mostly in order.

For each scene, I mostly would, in order:

• Set up the Background image that I wanted

• Set up the choice for screen moving or standing still

• Set up the choice for one of 11 moveable images software control

• Then I would key the "Run Wolfie and LilRed" button if I was using that, to begin their action

• Then I would press the "Move Screen" button if it was needed

• Then I would start the camera, which had already been set up for the correct screen area

• Then I would key things such as Fireworks, or Flowers Grow or the like

• Then I would stop the camera at the correct amount of time or just a second longer for trimming later

• For band scenes for the instrumental middle, I took a full band video, but then since the instrumental part was long, I also did cameo videos of LilRed, Wolfie, and the two others in back for variety.  The screen image camera can be set to multiple size and locations.

IS THIS HARD TO DO?

I am not an egotist, and as such I do not think anything I do is really that hard.  But I will say that I learned much of the skills slowly over time.  For example, this is November 2014.  I had two computer programming courses in school, but in about 1980 I began programming software at home, and that over time included multiple languages and three different types of computers.  In about 1982 I programmed some two dimensional games just to see if I could do it and that continued in part even to a Blackjack game on Windows computers later.  For some odd reason, I learned how to use Corel Photo Paint to modify images beginning perhaps about 1995 or so - not sure of that date - and that usage also continues.  As for one person band music I have been doing that at times since the early 1990's, and I have a book I wrote on the subject that is also spoken of on this website.  And therefore, I had plenty of time to learn all of this, slowly.  So for me, I would say it is easy.  How hard it would be for a person who has not done some of this, I really cannot say.  But what I will say is .... It can be a lot of fun.

TRIVIA

In the case of the band instruments, I did have some fun.  The Fender Stratocaster that Wolfie is playing is quite similar to appearance to one I own.  The Roland Keyboard the lady puppet is playing in back is not the same model as my Roland Keyboard, but they both are Roland Keyboards.  The Roland Keyboard is sitting on top of a Peavey KB100 keyboard amp, and I own one of those and it is in this house.  The black Fender Jazz Bass Guitar that LilRed is playing is a dead ringer for the black Fender Jazz Bass that I played in a band when I was about 21 years old.  The gold coloring on letters for the title and for "Wonderful World" I make by starting with white lettering and then filling the letters in with Corel gold coloring that has shading and light images built in.  The drum set?  I just found one I liked and put "The Puppets" on front as the name of the band.

And of course, you may have noticed that during the first part of the song before the band, Wolfie and LilRed seem to be moving to the right.  After the band scene, they then start going to the left instead, perhaps to come home before it is played again.

Ronald J. Plachno

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