Hi! So I just came back from Otakon 09 and it was great! I went to something that was both very interesting and inspiring. But I need to give credit for this idea to the person who originally inspired me to this.
Okay now some of you may have seen Selena's DREAM commercial by now right? Well when I saw this I thought it was a great idea. That maybe we could all do our own commercials and put them on some collective Youtube account for the DREAM Manga Group. But then I went to a panel by Mayshing the author of the webcome E-Depth Angel. (Great read and story btw) She is currently making an anime opening for her manga and its pretty impressive so far. The panel she hosted was called "How to Make your Own Anime at Home." It gave tips on how to go about making your own anime, the process, the labor, etc. So let me get to the point.

We could try and make our own anime trailer for the DREAM Manga Group! And we could do it together. It could be something like CLAMP in Wonderland or something. I know most of us have really busy schedules so we can take our time on it. But it would go faster if one person acted as key animator for like a few seconds in the film which would be I'd say something like about 5 or so minutes long. So what do you think? Any suggestions to make this work? I have a few to start.

-First, anyone can help be they mangaka or not.
-Since we all have unique styles, we should try and draw others styles as best as we can. Unless we want the mangaka to do his or her own characters.
-We should all have a say in the storyboard since it's a group project.
-Voice work? Mmm, not sure if they should talk or not.

That's what I got. Hope to do this someday! ^_^

The short opening by Mayshing is very impressive!! It would be very nice to be able to make an animation for Dream, but as starters, I am not sure how long it will take. (I heard it takes an hour to manke 10 seconds animation?) Do you have any information on her panel about how to make our own anime?

-Ki

That is a great idea! I'm so looking forward to this X) But then we need the softwares like FLASH to make an anime, right? Mmmm..., I don't know if what I'm doing is right but I drew a lot of layers of different expression of two characters; random girl and Ki.
Random girl got 22 layers? and Ki got 30 layers? Haha, I don't know if those are called layers but maybe I should post some samples

Yeah! I'd love to see those layers Anime. And yes it's okay to call them layers. Although animation or film would call them frames.
As to how to make our own anime I should start with the programs that we will need for the job.
-Adobe Flash CS3 for the rough animation
-Adobe After Effects or some movie program to make the animation
-Paint Tool Sai for inking line art
-Adobe Photoshop to color the line art frames of the animation
-Corel Painter 9 for backgrounds

So the first thing that you need to do is the story, script, and storyboard. Animation is one of those things where a storyboard is absolutely necessary. With the storyboard and script done, the next part of the process is to record the soundtrack including voices and music if the action is timed to it. Mayshing takes the complete storyboard to make a sort of animated storyboard she calls an "animatic." This part of it is done to give us an idea of how the final product will look with motion and timing.

With the storyboard phase complete then begins the looooooooong process of animation. The rough animation is the first real stage of this process which is more sketchy because it's either done in pencil or on Flash (which is what Mayshing uses at times). The main animation is called key animation which involves drawing the key frames one after another. We could probably say that a key animator can draw one frame for every second (or more depending on the action). For a 5 minute short that would mean 300 key frames at least. We would divide this of course. After the key animation is complete you then have to draw the in-between frames. These frames will bridge the gaps between each key frame and make the animation smooth. The standard speed is 24 frames per second so that is a lot of frames to consider. 6900 in between frames to be precise O_O. So that would be 7200 frames total.
With all frames (or a set of frames) done you can do a pencil test to see how the movie looks. This can be done with Photoshop. By importing the frames and cycling through the layers using Ctrl+[ or ] you can see how the movie moves.
The second stage involves taking all these pictures and inking them, and coloring them. Mayshing uses SAI for inking because the lines look nicer and more natural than Flash. But we can probably use whatever we're comfortable with. Coloring is done on Photoshop, layer by layer, frame by frame.
While animation is being done someone should be working on the backgrounds. A good tip she gave at the panel. If your background involves buildings of any kind use 3D modeling and trace it. Same probably holds true for robots too.

With backgrounds and animation all complete you then put it all together on a movie editor like Adobe After Effects, Sony Vegas Movie Studio, or another movie studio that you're comfortable with. Mayshing suggests After Effects because it imports PS files. Anyway, once you import, you will have what you need to add effects, move the background if you need to, and ses how it looks. Warning though that the movie files will be big. Like GB big if it's long enough.

The finished product should look like a movie.

Sounds hard.. Then we need to practice first before making a story animation.. Just practice the character's movement, poses and expressions first ^^'

Should I send you the frames then? =D

Yes Anime. I think that's a good idea to start off. We should do some test animation with our characters and see if we got it right. Yeah you can send me the frames. I'll see if I can put them into a movie form and post it later in the week. ^_^d

I've already sent it to your g-mail

Thanks Anime! I'm flipping through it right now and it animates well. ^^ Hoping to do some practice anime sometime this or next week.

wow this will be fun! If we could get people to work on this I'd be more than happy to help! Soon I'm going to get Abode Premiere CS4, which is mah movie-makin buddy ^_^ and one we figure out like a storyboard and what not I can help with animating and compiling the final pieces...

just for funsies I give you guys a preview of my lastest project (50% done)... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNnHXL6oBII

So I know a LITTLE about the animating deal... usually drawn with a graphics pad but I think I'll do hand-drawn/inked for DREAM and any future stuff ^^; anywho, enjoy, and I really hope we can do this!

Just so you know i am not really stalking you or anything, i just happened to see your link on my advertising program site, and got curious. (my ads retrieve links to my site.)

Since you are talking about doing your own animation, I feel the need to come in and put it in correct order.

Key animation comes before Rough animation.

Key framing is setting the major movement, the finished animation without colors or ink is the rough animation.

And for 1 person alone, at the fastest you can do 10 min film per year. That's the average i know in my school.

In a group of 20 it should be faster but it all depends on how many people can actually animate. 6 animators can actually make a movie in about 2-3 years.

Animators are still much fewer compare to other forms of artists. I have trouble recruiting suitable animators for my work without a fund that's why i am currently doing fund raising: http://mayshing.com/edepth/edepth-anime.htm

It takes about 1-2 weeks (for online at least) per artist to handle a sequence, no matter it's animating, coloring, or inking.
That's mostly how fast you get online, some people might be finished on the second day and pass it back to you, but in general, set the deadline at weekly bases is best. You never know who has real life issues that day to deal with.

I will be posting most of my animation eps related material on my animation page for Edepth if you need to keep watch of me to learn. I will be preparing some tutorials for free for people to learn animation.

OoO Mayshing! Well first let me say, welcome to the DREAM Manga forum. Glad that you're here and I hope you enjoy your stay! Second thank you for your advise and clarifications. The tutorials you're planning to post should be a great help to us so thank you in advance. I actually came to your panel at Otakon and would like to thank you for that too. It was a big inspiration.

Hello there everyone! Have been gone a while but I'm back. This idea is awesome! I wish you guys luck!

-KaiyouNoYume

omg, mayshing was on dream~!

/me is a huge fan of edepth angel~!

Ko-Okami, that animation looks AWESOME :O

I have only ever done stop motion animation and 3d animation as part of a school project in high school
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vQ5aZtfY2g

Hmm, this sounds like a super hard project to do together... i think it may even be worthwhile to do a sort of trailer with just kool transitions, music and stills to start with.

For the animation, all the animating aside, we'd first need a story line and story board. Once the story board is done (broken down into scenes and time and rough frame counts, including sound cues and movement indicators), we could asign everyone to a part of the animation. The previous animator would have to send in the last frame of their part so the next one can continue (you can do the last frame first, and then do the previous frames of your part but make sure it ends with the position of the last frame so the other ppl aren't waiting).

Once the whole sequence is done, then roles can be assigned for inking or colouring or what have you :S

All in all, its a quite lengthy project. One of the main problems would be collaborating, unlike the dream collab, this will be much hard to simply skip, opt out, or take over for someone else, and judging from the dream collab, it seems unlikely everyone can expend that kind of time :s

But it is a good idea :3 I don't know if I'd be of any use, but I made a vow not to take on any more new projects for the next year because nothing is getting done >.<

Anyone who can draw with a knowledge of at least how basic movement looks and works can animate scenes (erm, so long as they have some kind of animation program!) But it takes soooooooo long. x x The underdrawings, each sequence is the quickest part... It's the coloring that is the exhausting part.

The longest animation I've made so far (which FRUSTRATINGLY enough got deleted along with my other stuff when my computer crashed) took me weeeeeks to color ; ; It was a big fighty scene thing. But about three seconds of like, motion (beyond blinking and hair blowing in the wind which really only takes a few frames) takes me a day to draw and color to complete... Though I was distracted by msn the whole time. > >' But that's me.

I think for an advertisement for DREAM, something like... Oh, you know the openings of most Visual Novels and Dating Sims? They have a proper name but it's slipped my mind... Anyway, if you know what I mean, something like that. It does the job, advertises the content and looks effective with limited animation.. What do you think?

KO>> Coolness KO! That's a pretty cool animation btw. Didn't mean to miss commenting. We'd be glad to have you on board! ^^
Yuy>> Yours is pretty good too YuyRen! Yeah that sounds about right for what we need to do for this. It's gonna be a challenge but if what Mayshing says is true, it shouldn't take more than a month if we have a team of animators on this.
Vervain>> Animated intros to each manga might be a fun idea too. But for now I think a general DREAM manga project would be good.

So far I have the beginning of the animation fleshed out on a storyboard. I'll post what I have for that today as soon as I fix a few things. Soon though I would like to take all conversation about this project to a different section like the DREAM Manga Collab we have. But I think we should wait until we have a good idea of what we will be doing.