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Animation

November 29, 2017

When he started his PC career more than 20 years ago, he bought an application which allowed him to make animated movies. It was a very simple type. He made a person by combining circles (for heads) and rectangles (for hands and legs). The figure could walk and run. Just that though. He hoped that the application would have a better version in order to better elaborate the figures, but he couldn't find it. He eventually stopped using it.   Several years had passed. One day he happened to find an animated movie making application and bought it. But, soon he gave up using it because the software was very slow. It took more than 30 minutes to demonstrate his simple animation. He put on additional memory in his PC but the speed was still limited. He needed to wait 10 minutes or so after each his works to demonstrate the show. He finally gave up using it. Several years had passed. He was asked to make a booklet of his club activity that he belonged to. He wanted to put some illustrations in the booklet. He wasn't a type of person who could draw good illustrations by hand. So he bought an illustration making application. It was rather elaborate. You could choose a person's sex, generation, and appearance (race like). You could move the position of the person, angles by 360°degrees. You could also move each of person's limbs and, surprisingly, fingers. You could change the person's clothes, shoes, and hats from a broad selection, like a fashion model, from casual, formal, sports gears, and even ethnic or historical clothes. You could change the person's facial looks from crying to laughing. You could also choose the background setting and situation from a huge selection ~home, church, school, boutique, bookstore, museum, etc. Any landscape and scenery were also available. Plus, all types of goods that people seem to use. In addition, the copyrights of the contents were all free! He was able to finish the booklet in a reasonable amount of time, and he was gratefully thanked by the club members.   Several years had passed. He retired from his job. On this day he was browsing on the Internet. He was having a hard time to pass the time. He had only a few hobbies and was looking for a new one. He was watching YouTube. Soon he realized in YouTube there were so many 'instruction' videos, like how to grow your vegetables, how to write your biography, how to take good photos, how to swim, how to bake cakes, how to ... He got an idea and inserted a series of words in the search part 'how to make an animated movie', and clicked. Soon there appeared a list of a lot of websites. He started to watch them. After a while, he realized that if you prepared some animations, called 'key poses', there were some good applications to make animated movies. You didn't need to draw each animation, the application would make the middle parts. "But ..." he thought. Even so, he would need to make some illustrations of the characters in his story, as well as the backgrounds, house, roads, trees, etc, etc. He had no skill, and he didn't want to study this thing. When he came to this part, he remembered that he already had the application of making illustrations he had bought before. He smiled. YouTube also introduced auto reading voice software, in which you could make artificial voices reading the texts that you wrote. YouTube also introduced other useful applications like sound effects, music composing. These applications varied from cheap to expensive. Some of the animated movie making applications allowed one to use on a monthly basis. So if he felt it was too difficult, he could stop using it any time. Now, he started to think about the scenario of his new animated movie. Many instructors in YouTube emphasized that the most important thing of any animation movie was the story line. If the story is good, the movie already would be half successful. He wrote a 'joke' scenario. It was a very simple one, maybe 3 minutes or so. It was literally 'A Cup of Noodle Story'. In the story the protagonist, a young lady, was waiting at home for a cup of noodles to be ready. The cup of noodles was on the table in front of her, with a kettle next to it. From opening of the cup of noodles, steam was going up. A timer placed on the table was ticking by the second. Her face was one of expectation. At last, the chime rang. She opened the noodles. Suddenly a big genie came out and said, "I can give you any wish that will come true. Why don't you make one?" The woman said, "Give me another cup of noodles. You ruined mine." The genie disappeared shrugging. It was simple, but he liked it. If he could make this, he could make a better one the next time. He had time.

*allow :許す、可能にする
*combine :結合させる
*rectangle :長方形
*figure :形
*elaborate: 精巧にする、凝った
*eventually :やがて
*race :人種
*limb :四肢
*ethnic :民族の
*vary :様々である
*literally :文字通り
*genie :魔法使いの召使い
*shrug :肩をすくめる