Splicetoday

Digital
Jul 29, 2009, 06:21AM

The Adventures of Ledo and IX

Filmmaker Emily Jane Carmichael's philosophical homage to early video game graphics (think original Zelda).

Can you explain the process of animating?I make all the sprites, dialogue and backgrounds in Photoshop. I create tiny files and zoom way in, so every block the characters are made of is actually the size of one pixel and I don’t have to bother drawing a grid.To animate them, I use Flash’s ability to nest timelines within one another. So for example there’s what’s called a “movie clip” of Walking Ledo, which is nested into the larger timeline of the scene. I can give her blocking — places and times to start and stop walking — and Flash will just repeat the images of her walk cycle until I replace that clip, for instance with Standing Ledo. (Ledo has a three-part walk cycle, Ix a two-part one.)Sometimes I describe the film as 8-bit, but the look of the film is often more 16-bit. I try to limit my palate but I draw the characters and backgrounds in a full RGB environment, so even if I only use maybe 32 colors in a scene, they’d probably all be impossible in the 48-color palette of 8-bit game systems like the NES.

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