I'm planning on doing a comic.. i have the program to make dialog bubbles and all. However Ink is too expensive so i'm going to put my comic on DVD instead of printing it. And i have like 40 ideas for stories/comics . I have this idea though. That instead of just a bunch of images that i play as a movie...with each frame stopping for a number of seconds( like a slide show), i willl have music and sound effects to make the static comic feel more like animation.So the reader reads the comic and as he does, there will be sound effects and music which changes as the story goes. Kinda taking the reader in first person perspective, through their imagination rather than handing them an animation to see. Sure animation would be better, but i don't have time, nor computer power for that. So i think this plan i have is great. So here's my question. Should i vary the time that each frame stays on the screen AND to make it more like a continous animation...Should i make one image at the just the main points of the story or could i do some variations. like if there's a fight, a coupld of fast changing( 4 seconds each) pictures of the fight. To anyone who has a mac, i'm planning to do this Fake-animation comic book using Poser, Vue 5, and iMovie. I will do the effects in imovie( sounds, movie effects). Like if it's a foggy scene, the picture i display will not have fog but i can put animated fog with imovie. ANd also i can put actual animated rain with imovie. Well wish me luck. My first story is about a giant robot and how he destroys my city, then me and my nephew build another giant robot to stop him b efore he does more damage. see ya

It's an intriguing idea. (And not just because I've got a Mac, too.) Almost sounds like you're creating a story board for a movie. Have you heard of Plasq's "Comic Life"? Hands-down the best comic book creator software out there, bar none. And there's no need to worry about ink. You could always release your comic as a PDF. ;-)

tebop,
You've got a great idea!  Doesn't matter if it's not full motion.  Use this "constraint" as an opportunity to really stretch your imagination.  That's where the magic lives.  Good luck.

Quote - So i think this plan i have is great. So here's my question. Should i vary the time that each frame stays on the screen AND to make it more like a continous animation...Should i make one image at the just the main points of the story or could i do some variations. like if there's a fight, a coupld of fast changing( 4 seconds each) pictures of the fight.

This kinda depends on what you are actually making. ie are you doing an animation that happens to be told with still frames, or are you doing a comic with special effects. If you are doing a comic, then the timing doesnt matter much IMO, just make sure each page stays long enough for the reader to take everything in (or better yet add a button to flip the page)

If you are going for an animation, then that is a whole different ball game. The key here is to use smart camera moves to cover for the 'missing frames'. ie say you want to make a character walk from his bed to the window. You would start with a keyframe of him at the bed (and secondary keyframes for yawning, getting up and so on) and then do a cut to the keyframe of him standing at the window. And you time the various frames according to how much time it would take in real life. Like go lie down on a bed and time yourself getting up. Use a stopwatch if necessary. That is the timing you want in the anim. You can also fill in gaps with 2D pans and zooms that dont need to be rendered out.

If you do it well enough, the viewer's imagination will fill in all the rest. Many low budget TV toons and anime use this limited motion technique and it works very well. In fact i would say go rent a few anime shows and watch them for reference. These guys put out 20-30 mins of entertaining animation on a shoestring budget.  You can learn a lot of tricks by studying them.

Anyways best of luck and keep us posted :)

Thanks all. and thanks for the suggestions and comments. "Have you heard of Plasq's "Comic Life"?" Yeah, that's what i'm using^_^ Yeah and you're right in saying it's like a story board. The good thing about it also is i'm rendering at full render with textures and all, and not having to worry about long render times for animation or massive amount of diskspace because it's just one image frame and not a movie clip . So that gives me the ability to create anything i imagine and put it out in high quality render.

make it so they click the right arrow to go forward one frame, left arrow to go back. but who's gonna build the third giant robot, in case robot #2 also goes berserk?

Miss Nancy beat me! A couple of other points. I would test the process rather early on - maybe even immediately - for this reason: Usually DVD's think of their material as a movie. Therefore the music would be synchronized to the picture. In that scenario everytime the arrow was pushed the music would jump - and that could become annoying to the viewer. However Sometimes the images can be imported into the DVD burning software and literally treated as a slideshow. In that case, the audio might not jump when the arrows are pushed. I don't know. I've only created a DVD-based slide show once and the client didn't have any audio so I didn't check that aspect out. I would do a test - using graphics you already have - and check out how your DVD software works. Another option would be to create this as a PowerPoint slideshow with music. I don't know for sure how that would work but I know you can add music to PowerPoint and I think you can let it play across slides. If you have PowerPoint, check the manual to see how that works. A PowerPoint on a CD may be less expensive that burning it to DVDs (for distribution purposes).

Quote - ...I would test the process rather early on - maybe even immediately ...

 
Absolutely!! Testing must be an integral part of your pipeline, especially if you plan on distributing as firmware (CD/DVD).  Mistakes discovered after the burn can be costly.

Quote - ...Usually DVD's think of their material as a movie. Therefore the music would be synchronized to the picture. In that scenario everytime the arrow was pushed the music would jump - and that could become annoying to the viewer. However Sometimes the images can be imported into the DVD burning software and literally treated as a slideshow. In that case, the audio might not jump when the arrows are pushed. I don't know...

 
On DVD use "Chapters" to bound your jump points. You can put multiple frames inside the Chapters.  Can be as few as one frame. This allows the background SFX to resync at Chapter boundaries when a jump occurs. As for music,  I suspect in most cases, unless the project is a music video,  it won't be playing continuously throughout an entire chapter.  

Quote - ...*A PowerPoint on a CD may be less expensive that burning it to DVDs (for distribution purposes)...

 
Does a PowerPoint slideshow require the user to have PowerPoint?  Additionally,  there may be other transportability issues.

• Bomac

Hm, I've been toying with a similar idea.

What I decided was to use flash. You can have hot points be just about anything (including a minimal frame with the standard rewind/forward buttons). So....you could have some sections of the current image allow the reader to learn extra details about something by clicking some of background stuff or even allow them to view the story in more than one way.

Also, you would have a fair amount of control over everything, including music, if you mix your music carefully enough so that shifting isn't jarring and repeating isn't annoying.

good luck!

This is more for pc's than Macs

I've played with this too awhile back and I'm ready to pick it up again.  I used still photos that told a story in sequence - same as any still pics I guess.
Tried several progs to make slide shows  and add music/sounds - however lost all my notes I made while trying them and my memory is attrocious.

 I tried:
 Nero Vision Express
Flip Album    www.flipalbum.com/
Powerpoint
Movie Maker

They all worked more or less so it's a matter of what xttras one needs.
 
Nero Vision did fine but I recall having some issues with recording it as svcd. Weird since the parent Nero is burning software.

Flip Album which can turn pages is kinda cute and will save avis but I kept on searching for added effects.

PowerPoint   and  MS Movie Maker both also make slide shows with sound.  Movie Maker comes with WinXP and you can overlay animated titles.

I guess it's back to try-outs again for me too as this is about all I recall right now.  Wouldn't mind reading some more input from others either.
Cheers
Masha

For macos users, doing it with iMovie it's terribly painful because adding video, imovie starts eating all my disk space.. in seconds. I have only 1GB now, and it's gone like after only 10 seconds of video. I guess i'm going to have to leave the iMovie idea alone and just do slide shows in IpHoto, with music of course. OR i can arrange the music with sound effects in imovie save that as a music file and then import that music+soundeffects into the iPhoto slideshow.

Tebop, I'd urge you to do a little more research into Flash like Mamba-Negra suggested.

You don't need the full version of Flash to make something like this - a third party app that outputs Flash would be just as good, probably better. (Check out the $60 Incrediflash to start with.)

Some good things about Flash:

• You can get many of your iMovie type effects (pans, zooms, wipes, etc.) but they are faster to create and don't gobble disk space. Instead of, say 300 frames of rendered video for a 10-second pan, you are only storing one large still (the scene across which the pan is happening) and the instruction to move the "camera" across the scene. It winds up being A LOT less storage space, and therefore more content that you can fit on your disk. And of course it renders hundreds of times faster.
• If there's something that absolutely requires the odd iMovie effect (rain for example) you can render just that segment as a video and embed the video in your flash movie.
• Music and sound effects can be handled very efficiently and seamlessly in Flash, and you can also save on disk space through creative use of sound loops.

Flash will play back on nearly any system, although not a DVD player, of course.

Sorry, I googled "Mac Flash tools" and Incrediflash came up - but on closer look, it's really a Windows app :glare:

There must be 3rd party flash creation apps out there for the Mac, but seemingly they're not as easy to find as the PC ones (for me at any rate.) You could check out A2Flash which DEFINITELY runs on the Mac but it's feature set is a bit more limited. Maybe somebody else can pitch in. Or you could go to Flashkit.com and spend some time poking around.

Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Or this: PulpMotion

Keynote can export Flash -based presentations.