Choosing Equipment for Cartoon Animation

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Cable for Expert Village. In this case, we'll be using a laptop, Macintosh and also I'll show you an example of how to do this with a PC as well. Now you'll need your drawn artwork, in this case, we have our flipbook and our bouncing ball animation. You also need some sort of registration system. Here we have a pegbar that lines up with the hole in the animation paper. A couple pieces of tape. We will also need a consistent light source. Now you can do this by a bright window, but because the sunlight is likely to change over the course of the day, or even a few minutes, it's nice to do it with some controlled lighting. Even just an ordinary work light will do. Careful, this one can get very hot. So be careful when you're using just a utility lamp like this. For the cameras, this is where you have a lot of choices. First of all, you can even use just an ordinary webcam for making computer calls or even video blogging. This is fine for pencil testing. Webcams attach with a USB cable into your computer. You can also use a mini-dvd camcorder with a firewire connection. You also need a firewire cable. A four-pin to a six-pin connector. The four-pin goes into the camera, the six-pin goes into the computer. Another choice is a digital still camera. This one has a maximum of 6.1 megapixels. Resolution is something that you might want to experiment with, but a digital still camera, a USB cable for transferring the images from the camera to the computer, and also a memory card. In this case, this camera takes an XD card, and I would recommend at least 256 megabytes, because you'll be taking a lot of pictures. You'll also need a tripod. An inexpensive but sturdy one will do. "