General-Animation African Challenge

   Animation should serve noble purposes, which is why today we give start to our animation challenge. In this challenge we will study animation and make cartoons to draw public attention to the problem of poverty and inequality on the black continent and to direct the forces of the world community to eradication of illiteracy in Africa.

   We will call our competition “General-Animation African Challenge”, and we invite all animators - famous and not so very celebrated - to take part in it. Your task will be simple - you tell us about yourself and your work, introduce your character, and show a small cartoon with his participation. For our part, we promise active promotion of your work, and even try to provide little incentive prizes for the most active participants.

   And we already have the first participant of our animation challenge! Our new student from Egypt - Ali Abdullah Haidan sent us these funny monkeys dancing among the alpine meadows. This is his first animated work, so do not judge too harshly. This is just the case when it is not the reward that matters, but participation. Our main task at the current stage is to draw public attention to the problems of the black continent. Make people think about how we can help African youth. Great job, Ali! 

   One more video from Ali Abdullah Haidan on Alpine theme - this time it’s a cheerful gnome singing, as I understand it, alpine tunes. You can see even more videos from Ali on his YouTube channel.

  Even if you have never made cartoons before you can still take part in our challenge! Especially for you, I created a section in our free video tutorials on animation on Udemy, where I tell in detail how you can, using the simplest tools, create your first cartoon character and make him move, so he goes on a journey through the Alps. Links to our amimated video lessons on Udemy:

   Course N1: Basic Animation in Adobe After Effects

   Course N2: Animation in After Effects project oriented course

   Visit our site General-Animation.com to follow the news, learn animation with us, and we will make cartoons together!

   And in the first issue of our challenge, we will introduce you to a wonderful charity organization Learning Lions, and begin the story of the new adventures of Winnie the Pooh…

Introduction

    This information is intended primarily for those who visit our site for the first time. Our regular visitors can immediately go to the section "Blog" and "Our projects" in the main menu of the site.
    We are glad to welcome you on the portal of our studio General-Animation, where together with our partners from many countries of the world we create cartoons dedicated to solving the most painful problems of our time. You can ask: how children's cartoons can help solve the problems of humanity? It seems to us that the main barrier to the development of human civilization is an extreme imbalance in the level of development of the most advanced countries and the rest of the world. The development gap generates many conflicts, the solution of which absorbs huge resources, and hinders the accelerated movement of humanity along the path of progress. Our efforts are aimed at eliminating this imbalance as soon as possible. And we have instruments, which allow even the inhabitants of the poorest countries right now to join the achievements of modern computer technologies, to participate in the process of human development and at the same time to improve their personal well-being and the general welfare of the countries in which they live.
    To achieve this goal, we have created a series of animated video lessons, in which funny cartoon characters in an easy and accessible form tell about how to make cartoons. Our video lessons and our cartoons have gained quite a lot of popularity, and now we use them for training our students, who later become our animators and make cartoons with us. So welcome to our global animation network. You can write scripts for cartoons, create characters and voice them, draw backgrounds, and of course make animation. How to do this is told in our wonderful video lessons link to which you will find in the main menu. Read the news of the site and our projects in the sections "Blog" and "Our projects" of the main menu, learn the animation with us, and we will make cartoons together!
    The most active and creative students in the learning process we pay incentive scholarships.

Yellow Dog - the first steps

   And so - you decided to make animation. Now I will show you how you can easily create your own cartoons or participate in creating animations with us. As an example, I will use our charming symbol of 2018 - the Yellow Dog.
   Visit our website general-animation.com Go to the “Downloads” section of the main menu of the site. Find there the article "Models for Animation 2018", click on the picture with the Christmas tree and the Dog and download the archive "Danny Dog 2018.rar" Unpack this archive using Winrar, and you’ll get the folder "Danny Dog". In this folder you will find another folder "Christmas tree" with Christmas trees, photoshop files "Christmas background.psd" with a New Year background that you can use in your cartoon and the file "Danny Dog Rastr.psd" with a rasterized model of our Yellow Dog. But the most interesting are the first three files, the names of which begin with 01, 02 and 03. These are ready-made projects for the Adobe After Effects program, in which we assembled the model of our Yellow Dog, and now we will tell you how to work with these models.
   Let's start with the project "01 Danny Dog.aep" In this After Effects project the simplest model of the Yellow Dog is assembled. That is, we just imported a file with parts of the dog "Danny Dog Rastr.psd" in Adobe After Effects, tied the eyes and mouth to the head, the head to the body, hands to the body, and so on. And got the simplest model of a dog that will perfectly suit your first experiments on animation. Open this project with Adobe After Effects, move hands and feet with the “Rotation” parameter, and make your cartoons about the adventures of the Yellow Dog.

   How all this can be done we tell in detail in our fascinating video lessons on animation in the Adobe After Effects program. These video tutorials you can find on our website General-Animation.com

   The link to our Video Lessons 

   Do not forget also about our free course on the Udemy website, where you will find even more interesting materials.

   We continue our acquaintance with the contents of the archive "Danny Dog 2018.rar". I think the greatest value for true connoisseurs of animation is the file "02 Danny Animette.aep" This is the same model as in the project "01 Danny Dog.aep", but in it added animation of walk and speech cycles. That is, you do not have animate each time the movement of hands and feet when walking. It is enough to set the parameter "Go" to 1, and the dog will start waving his arms and legs, representing walking, and you will only have to move the model over the composition. It's also easy to do speech animation: use Keyframe Assistant to convert Audio to Audioamplitud for an audio file, insert the resulting keyframes into layer 6 “Danny Audio Amplitude”, and the dog will start opening her mouth and waving her hands to represent the speech. What is Animettes and how to use them I described in detail in one of our lessons.

And finally, the exemplary project "03 Animation Sample.aep" in which our dog runs around the Christmas tree. You can learn how the animation is done in this project, how to modify it and use it in your cartoons.

Adventures of Yellow Dog 03

   We continue to make our cartoon. In this scene I used our footage for year 2017 the symbol of which was a rooster. In our video lessons we use animal models for each year. In such way in this scene met the symbols of two years at once - 2017 the year of the rooster, and 2018 - the Year of the Yellow Dog. It turned out very joyful and cheerful meeting. And so: Yellow Dog walked along the cartoon forest and came across the house of a merry chicken family. View the full version of the cartoon and take part in its creation you can in "Our Projects" sectition of our website.