An update on my frustrations getting Anime Studio 5 to export to a Quicktime format so that I can get animated cartoon videos up online: With some further experimentation, I’ve found that I can get the program to work, if I dumb down the videos. I can export without the program crashing if I remove backgrounds, simplify the animations, and shrink the videos to thumbnail size. Otherwise, the only thing I can do is export an animated video ten or twenty seconds at a time – not an approach that’s worth my while.
Before, I had my anima standing in front of a grassy field with the sun twirling in the sky, trees in the background, and a passing cloud. Now, I’ve put my anima in a vat of grape juice (against a plain purple background), the video is half the size as a normal video. He’s talking about the Protect America Act, and the shameful Democratic capitulation to George W. Bush’s demands to provide legal immunity to telecommunications corporations that broke the law by helping Bush spy on Americans, and to allow searches of Americans’ homes without any search warrant and without anyone but the Attorney General, a political appointee, to say no.
Grape Juice and political commentary. Does it mix? Does it need to?
I’m exploring the idea that a certain sort of American is becoming incapable of getting any political news unless it is spoken aloud to them, with pretty pictures, much in the way that a pre-schooler needs a mommy or daddy to read Goodnight Moon over and over again. I don’t like it, but it seems that we’ve got many generations of people now who have been raised to think of what a video screen shows them, not what they read for themselves, and certainly not what they get from original sources. A lot of people who might loosely be called political progressives don’t know about what happens in the news if they don’t see a comedy bit about it on The Daily Show or The Colbert Report.
So, I’ve been asking myself, does it really help to supplement our political writing here at Irregular Times with animated cartoon presentations of the same information, edited down for the sake of time? When people can’t stand to watch a YouTube video that’s more than two minutes in length, should I go with the flow? Can the message fit the medium?
I don’t have answers to these questions yet. I do know one thing, though: I just can’t stop watching this other video, the product of my 2 year-old daughter speaking into the microphone for the same Anime Studio 5 program that’s brought me so much frustration today. Something about the moving image in combination with my daughter’s voice makes it more compelling for me. It’s the same idea that made the Creature Comforts videos so fascinating (picture a rowdy mouse in front of a microphone singing “Rule Britannia! Britannia rule the waves…”)
The guy looks like you right down to the chin dimple. Can your daughter explain “unitary executive” or maybe why it’s okay for the president not to follow the law? That might be fun to see a Dubya cartoon do that. Or to have a child voice explain why its not okay, like it’s that elementary. I confess I can’t get the other two to load after waiting what seemed like forever on dialup. But your stuff has always been about timing and sound anyhow, not technology. Mood too.
Don’t think of political comedy being a replacement for the news. Think of comedy being uplifted by people who think current events are worth making jokes about. Johnny Carson used to joke about sex; Leno jokes about politics. Think back to the days when Laugh-In was more watched than That Was The Week That Was. Yes, go with the sound bite. It’s the taxi test, how to reduce your issue to explain to a New York Taxi driver. If you can do that, you can sell the idea. But you also need the interest groups (and the homework) behind it. This is how the cream rises and people with limited time know which news stories to follow.
A political animation is just another form of political cartoon. The good political cartoonists, like Oliphant, aren’t just entertainers; they make the reader think. If that’s what you’re aiming at, then go for it.
You might look for another animation tool. Consider that you don’t have to create a video file (as in QuickTime or MPEG); you could go with Flash instead. There are lots of Flash editing tools out there (I haven’t used any of them, though, so I can’t recommend one).
Or you could get yourself an account on Second Life, make your avatar act out the movie, and record it. (Um…I forget; are you using a MacBook or a MacBook Pro? Second Life will work on a MacBook Pro, but not a MacBook—the cheap Intel graphics chip in the MacBook is missing some features that the Second Life people assumed everybody would have.)