Brody´s ghost video

In the last post, I was writing about my rain video, which was quite a technical thing to do, drawing wasn´t involved so much. And I think it´ll be nice to draw a little more this time. I´m too lazy to create a proper character of my own for the new video. Problem is that (obviously) in my few-second-long videos, I can´t develop epic stories. So I´ve decided to do a short video with characters of someone else.

I like videos of Mark Crilley on Youtube, mostly about drawing manga, or drawing in general. And I have bought some of his comic books, called Brody´s Ghost, which I like. So, I´ve decided to try make a short animated video with some characters from Brody´s Ghost. These days, I read everywhere about copyright and some punishments and courts and laws and people going to prison, which makes me slightly nervous about this whole thing. By doing short animated video with characters from Brody´s Ghost, I will probably break copyright laws, Geneva Conventions and Prime Directive from Star Trek. But I think I´ll risk it anyway.

And now to the video itself. In the Brody´s Ghost comic books, there is a samurai ghost called Kagemura, who has five companions, other ghosts. My idea is, that the samurai ghost will be floating from the left to the middle of the screen, where he will stop. Then he will turn his head and look into the camera. The camera will zoom out a little and he will snap his fingers to call the other five ghosts who will jump and arrive to the scene. In a fight preparation kind of way.

They will arrive one by one, because I don´t want it to be chaotic and I want the video to be longer. That´s it. I think I will spend less time cleaning the whole thing in computer, because that´s not the point here. And it doesn´t help much either. Which means there will be no colours or black and white or anything like that.

I like to start in the beginning, which is the reason why I am starting with drawing the samurai ghost turning his head to look at us. This is the first thing, desite the fact that he has to arrive from the left first. I have decided that arriving from the left is not an exciting action movement so it´ll be good enough to make my laptop render the frames. I it is enough to take the character and move him from left to the center, there will be no change of shapes. And when there is no change of shapes, I don´t see a reason to draw it. That´s boring.

On the video below is my usual ugly (or maybe I should call it rough) first try of seeing what I want to do and deciding about the timing. It´s a series of a few main drawings that tell what is happening. The drawings in between, that I´ll add later, will be there just to "do the movement" and help getting from A to B.

And here are the links for the following posts for this video:

• part I
• part II
• part III
• part IV
• Final part