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Wargoon Flishe is a feature length animated film based on the novel The Epic of Wargoon Flishe According to John Akre. It is, in the words of its creator, "a nice cartoon about cannibalism, mass murder, and marketing." It follows in the form of many other hero stories, known well by all cultures over time.
The film is a bit like an audio book with moving illustrations. An abridged version of the book is read by the animator Akre, He also voices all the characters, and all the sound effects other than fire (crumpled up pages of his novel). Music is provided by some very scratchy 78 rpm records in his collection.
In order to bring his fictional character Wargoon Flishe and all the other characters to some kind of life, the animator Akre has utilized several different animation techniques.
- Drawing. Mostly drawing with Sharpie pen on 3X5 cards. The drawn upon cards are then scanned into a computer where they are colored and lined up.
- Locatiamation. Locatiamation is a process pioneered by the animator Akre, tho the basics of the process were stolen from many other animators of the past. In Akre's case, sequential drawings are drawn with sharpie pen onto post it notes. These post it pages are then animated one at a time on location. In order to do this with little problem, Akre has developed a device he calls the Locatiamator, which stands for Location Animation Generator. It is a photo flash bracket with a piece of glass affixed to it. He connects this device to his video camera and shoots the post it pages upon the glass. The real world is seen on the edges. The lighting is procurred by whatever available light is present
- Photoshop and Premiere programs. Drawings are scanned into the computer and painted and lined up in Photoshop. They are placed one after another as a video sequence in the Premiere video editing program. This step is really a rehash of step one.
- Adobe After Effects program. The bulk of the animation has been created using this tool. The animator Akre creates a photoshop document that is the overall background, or world, within a series of scenes will take place. He manipulates his characters, which are also photoshop documents, within this background using the keyframe tools of After Effects. He then crops video size squares out of this larger background composition to create individual scenes.
I suppose you already knew all of that.
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