Motion Comics {Fellow motion comic creators post your ideas, tips, tricks and questions here}

[minzinger]

There are some people here who do GIFs for webcomics. Maybe @feyuca can help... Maybe @taihendechu...

[keii4ii]

If only a small part of your episode is animated, remember you can stack multiple images per episode. Just crop the animated row, save that as GIF, and the rest can be unanimated GIF or JPG or whatever.

Orrr if your entire episode is animated... I guess you can still crop the "image" and save/uplaod in pieces? Maybe that would help with the filesize...

I've never done animation for my comic yet, so hopefully more experienced folks will chime in!

[kelseymc7]

Hmm, I'll see if breaking an episode into panels would help, thanks

[PotooGryphon]

Bog Girl is my favorite motion comic on Tapastic. It looks like, to save on file size the artist, Kurt, didn't use the full 940 px width limit Tapastic has for uploading pages. Looks like the width is maybe half that, and each episode has multiple pages in it. The first episode might be 4 images files uploaded together. Maybe you can try asking the Kurt Snyder for his methods. He seems to have a pretty good process for uploading gifs to Tapastic.

http://tapastic.com/series/BogGirl

[minzinger]

Bog Girl is my favorite motion comic on Tapastic.

Hell yeah! It's amazing

[taihendechu]

Oops I saw this just now^^

When I'm using animation in my comic it's just in single panels. That helps a lot to keep the file size low!
I wish I would be an animation pro.. but most of the time I seriously have no idea what I'm doing ._.

The BogGirl Comic really looks great _

[PotooGryphon]

@minzinger Does Tapastic team have any cool plans for incorporating more motion comic capabilities into the site? Like maybe allowing more upload space for animated gifs or some other really cool innovative idea?

[emibee]

I use just Photoshop for my animated gifs and save them out via "save for web" rather than just the "save as." Seems to cut down on the size a bit. I use the full 940px, and my files are normally around 1 mb.

[minzinger]

@taihendechu - No plans, yet. But, I can see that happening in the future if we see more creators requesting such tools. Probably not the best use our resources because we have a 3 year plan and we are still focused on executing. Tapastic is getting there. Another concern would be delivery speed/size on mobile networks. Data is still expensive in many countries so that's a concern. With everyone's help with helping Tapastic grow faster, we can hopefully hire more people to launch more features faster.

[yuliusefferven]

maybe google will make .swf file playable on android :< here's hoping anyway

[feyuca]

@kelseymc7 What might help is deleting in between frames. That bumps the file size down a lot
you don't need a lot of frames to make your animation work! Highly recommend http://thunderpaw.co/

[kelseymc7]

Thank you all for your advice! It's very helpful.

Highly recommend http://thunderpaw.co/

Omg I love thunderpaw. I think I'm looking at doing something similar to that, but also somewhat like http://artofpho.submarinechannel.com/ in how it's sort of cinematic. I'll probably try to learn how to use Adobe Muse and Edge Animate to create a browser friendly form of it. As for posting it on Tapastic can flash files be posted on tapastic? @minzinger
Or I'll just figure out a way to condence it for the site, it'll be lower quality if I have to gif it.

[minzinger]

@kelseymc7 - Unfortunately, no flash files, yet.

[MylCreates]

OOoo Just subscribed!

[brianvanritze]

Not seeing a lot on this. It would be nice if Tapastic allowed us to embed video or upload video directly onto the site.

I have a series that I'm bringing out that moves between video and comics and every other sort of media, so I decided -- screw it, I'd just start uploading "episodes" onto Tapastic via video links.

It's not the most awesome solution, but maybe if Tapastic gets video at some point I can then just load the videos straight onto the site.

[studiomik]

Hi everybody,

Been looking for ways to make comics more motion like and inter-active for some time now.
I think that's an awesome way to bring comics to life on a tablet. Love the GIF animated ones, but couldn't get them to be inter-active.

So i went searching the web and found this little program called HYPE Tumult.
It's Mac only, not that expensive and works kinda like Flash, exporting it to widgets, html5 or animated GIF's.

I'm not good at coding or anything HTML at all but i managed to make this:
http://www.studiomik.nl/hype/game/gameofchick.html

Make sure you put on the sound for a good experience!

I'm really enthousiastic about this program and hope to make more inter-active stuff in the future.
Perhaps it could be of any use to you guys?

Check it out if you'd like to make motion webcomics!

[Spinester]

@studiomik That is fantastic! I'm curious about the learning curve and how long it took to put that together. I'd love to get into motion comics if there's a way to do it where it doesn't take so long to finish one.

[studiomik]

Thanks man! Well things like this, don't happen overnight. But if you're used to the program, making the drawings would be the hardest part. All i really did was putting buttons and basic actions on the drawings. Like: 'go to next scene' or 'when pushed, play this sound and play that timeline'. No code is required, you only have to link those things together. I found the learning curve quite easy. You have to find your way around into the program but that's it. Like i said, i'm not good at coding, guess i'm more a "what you see is what you get" kinda guy . Hard to say how long it took me to make this but, but i guess a week or 2 in total using only the basics ot this program.

[kelseymc7]

Hey all! I haven't managed to update in a while but I did find a (long complex) process that works for me. Unfortunatly I no longer have the programs I need to make the other chapters. But I created chapter 1 of my motion webcomic! It's button interactive, I used a long list of programs I'll give you my process if anyone wants it.

Anyone want to read it and tell me what they think? If there's any bugs let me know.

Andy & Mr.Daisy Chapter One

Thanks for all your input!

[abbastudios]

Very buggy on iPad. Takes a while to load and arrows don't always work.