Source: Cartoon Brew

Source: 3 Grenouilles

A rapid re-telling of the story of “Swan Lake”, rapidly animated by Greg Holfeld using only the traditional tools of paper, pencils and coffee. Shortlisted for Tropfest 2011. For more info about the film, please visit sumolake.blogspot.com

For those that are still scanning hand drawn animation and found my first Brother post useful, you’ll be interested to know there’s a new model on the line. This one’s sleeker and sexier, the Brother MFC-J6510dw. Click the image to be taken to Staples where it’s currently $100 off for Canadian residents. Auto-feed your 12 Fields and taken the hassle out of pencil tests.

I recently bought a scanner to do pencil tests on, and it’s working out nicely. So I thought I’d recommend it to anyone looking at animating on paper. You’ll likely be in the market for something similar someday.  I followed this guide, and set out looking for an Auto Document Feed scanner that could handle 12 Field paper (10.5” x 12.5”). This meant I had three criteria in my search: It had to be cheap because I’m a student, it had to have ADF so I could spend more time animating (learning), and it had to be Wide Format so I could fit the animation paper in it. To make a long story short, after searching the internet, and checking out every store in town, I settled on this:

This in the Brother MFC-6490. It matched all my criteria, most important of which was cost, only setting me back $250. That’s a steal considering the prices for these kinds of scanners used to be in the thousands of dollars range. Now I spend all day animating and studying this:

And when I need to test my work, I just stack everything in the tray on top, and my pencil test is ready in a few minutes. I remember doing a tests with a camera back in film school, and how long that took. So much time was wasted that could have been used animating or learning something new. I hate wasting time, so I’m super happy with this purchase. I couldn’t find anything like this from HP, Epson, or Canon, so I think this is the only one on the market in that price range.

I’m super excited about posting some animation tests, but that will have to wait a bit. I feel I should get past the really basic boring stuff before I post anything. Plus I suck, which doesn’t motivate me to share my shiny terds.