ErBoi

The images of Trump in The Simpsons are indeed from a recent interstitial. However, as is detailed in the Snopes link, the future-set episode in which Lisa is President Elect and mentions inheriting a "budget crunch from President Trump" is "Bart to the Future", which first aired in March of 2000. Trump doesn't appear on-screen at all during that episode, he's just mentioned. And, as I recall, the premise of the episode is a Native Mystic showing Bart who he will be "in 30 years". So since The Simpsons always takes place in whatever year it is, that means they the episode put Trump being elected president in 2026 (or 2022 and got re-elected). So they did predict his presidency, they were just off by 10 years.

Grave of the Fireflies springs to mind. The movie is just a long string of crappy things happening to a couple of mannequin's masquerading as children, and I'm supposed to feel sorry for them. The movie makes no attempt to give the kids any kind of identifiable personalities and, by extension, make them likable, so I really don't care about them. It just reads as emotional blackmail; "You have to be sad because they're little kids and all this bad stuff is happening to them! If you don't feel sad, you're terrible!" I also think the narrative is weak otherwise. It's a series of completely unconnected, unfortunate events. There's no real overarching plot and several elements come and go with no contribution to the story at large.

Personally, I sure would love to see some original Dragon Ball love in the sequel. The trailer says "Protect the History of Dragon Ball". Yeah, the history of Dragon Ball doesn't start with Raditz. That said, my wishlist is pretty simple and realistically what's going to happen anyway: Better character creator Maybe more races Less RNG nonsense And, yeah, Emperor Pilaf-Piccolo Jr. content in the main Story mode.

Stop drawing only anime. Value rough stages; your drawings will always look better if you rough them out first. Use the internet to look up gesture drawings and other references. Look up Disney's Nine old men, as well as Glen Keane and Andreas Deja. Look at more French art. Look up and study the principles of animation; principles which are helpful even in still drawings. Basically, give my younger self a head start on college (well, and the rest of my life).

I remember buying some Compact Flash cards back in high school. At the time, they were generally priced around $100 CAD per Gigabyte. Now, a 16GB SD card is around $25.

Super has shaped up poorly in my opinion. The retread of the movies was exhausting enough, but the Universe 6 tournament has been a bit of a slap in the face. The first few episodes of the current arc were pretty solid. We got interesting concepts and interactions...and as of the last couple episodes, it has completely fallen on its face. I am a pretty obsessive fan when it comes to Dragon Ball, and even I can't stick by Super. If the next episode is another disappointment, I think I'm going to jump ship entirely. To the point of the animation, yeah it's been pretty subpar on average. There's some good stuff in there, but it's been extremely rare. And the noticeably-bad is far too frequent. To my understanding, a huge part of the problem is the current state of the anime industry: They're producing more content than ever, with roughly the same number of people and a higher proportion of amateurs. In that state, the quality is going to suffer. The infamous fifth episode of Super (the episode those images a few posts up come from) also had the misfortune of scheduling problems. Some of those frames were redrawn for the blu-ray release but on the whole, didn't result in a huge improvement. But I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the original animes had pretty varied quality too (though still with a better average track record). Pretty much anything done by Last House after the Freeza saga has atrocious artwork and passable animation at best: Studio Live's work wasn't much better: This isn't to say we shouldn't criticize Super's quality. Criticism is one of the most important things in art. I just thought it would be interesting.

Indeed. Now that we're (finally) in the Champa/Universe 6 arc, I've started to enjoy the show a lot more. Though my nitpicky side remains concerned about the timeline; Bulma either has to be pregnant with Bra right now or Bra needs to have already been born. Goten and Trunks haven't aged a day in 5+ years now. I'm willing to accept that for Goten, since Goku's appearance as a child was similarly stagnated until he had a massive growth spurt. Trunks, on the other hand, we already know what he should look like at this age thanks to the History of Trunks special. Yeah, the animation's been all over the place, and will likely continue to be that way. Though the original animes also had pretty varied animation quality (I still wince when I look at many of Last House Studio's episodes).

In my opinion, either Hyper Dimension or Supersonic Warriors. Hyper Dimension's probably the most competent/well-designed fighting game of the earlier era of Dragon Ball Z games. Cool mechanics, lots of risk vs reward the player has to consider, and the pixel art in that game is absolutely gorgeous. I'm not crazy about the music though. Supersonic Warriors is just super-inventive. Nice fast-paced, flight-centric, unorthodox fighting game. Love it. I didn't like the second one as much, but it was good too.

On Christmas in 2010, I got Donkey Kong Country Returns and began marathoning it in co-op with my older brother. It was so much fun. It was especially nice after we were both very disappointed with Kirby's Epic Yarn (Kirby Superstar being one of the biggest highlights of our early years playing games together). We beat the game a few days after Christmas and celebrated with a pizza. Last year, we played Tropical Freeze together. It wasn't quite as special since I had already beaten the game before the holidays. This year, I'm bringing my copy of Transformers Devastation with me when I go back to Ontario. It's not multiplayer but I'm stoked to watch my brother play through it for himself. We're both Transformers fans and some of my earliest memories are of us watching the original cartoon together.

The constant misuse of "then" and "than" by everyone and their mother is my major pet peeve when it comes to grammar. It's an understandable mistake but it gets under my skin all the same. The runner-up would have to be spelling "definitely" as "defiantly", which is astoundingly common. Like, not only have you spelled the intended word incorrectly, the word you did spell has a mutually exclusive meaning to the word you wanted. It would seem I'm one of many bothered by it, in fact: http://www.d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.com/

This is not surprising really, the show's story is meant to take place across a single summer and it's been ramping up to the climax of the story for the last several episodes. And I'm very OK with it. Looking it up, it looks like following Weirdmageddon II on Monday there will be a 1-hour episode (no air date for that yet) to cap the series. That sounds perfect to me. We'll get the conclusion to the current plot and we'll have some extra time for the story's resolution. Actually: From this article: http://www.avclub.com/article/gravity-falls-ending-228773 All I want now is a complete series blu-ray boxset.

I can't speak for Paint.NET as I've never used it but I definitely recommend against using MS Paint. Paint doesn't benefit any workflow for creating art. It can be alright for pixel art, but there are better tools even for that. Using better software is not lazy, just as working digitally as opposed to traditionally is not lazy either; it's efficient. At the very least, you should be using a program with layers. Layers give you all kinds of benefits; being able to separate characters and backgrounds, having rough work separated from clean work, applying filters on the individual elements of your drawing, etc. Just about every drawing program other than MS Paint uses layers. Layers are also extremely important for animation, but that's not the matter at hand. I was late to the party for it but I'm absolutely in love with Paint Tool SAI now. It's not free but, as far as good art programs go, it's pretty dang cheap. GIMP is alright as well. Though software is only one side of the matter. A good program isn't going to magically improve your artistic skill. That has come from learning and practicing technique. The best way to do that is through Life Drawing classes.

In the English dubs of Dragon Ball Z, Frieza was played by women (Pauline Newstone first, then Linda Young...then back to Pauline Newstone depending on which network you watched...Dragon Ball dubs are really convoluted), and it's cited as why his gender is confused a lot. While his race doesn't really have a gender, in the show and manga he's always referred to with masculine pronouns. Incidentally, among many things I appreciate about the English dub of Kai is that they recast Frieza. Not only does he have a male actor now; though the voice is still pretty androgynous; but one that better captures the spirit of the character as he's portrayed in the Japanese original (the previous English dubs effectively rewrote his personality). Aaanyway, one more vote for Goku's original Super Saiyan transformation. I forgot until seeing it mentioned in this thread, but when I was, like, 9 or so and I saw the Next Episode Preview that showed Goku as a Super Saiyan, I lost my mind with excitement. And speaking of Kai, I just remembered one more, not quite shocking but, surprising moment. The first and so far only time an English dub has ever acknowledged Son Goku's full name: https://youtu.be/75gUJ_4SyY0?t=72

I remember being in awe at how callously and brutally Gohan took out the Cell Jr.'s after reaching Super Saiyan 2. So I guess that would be my "most shocking" moment. There's also a bit when Babidi uses his magic to explode the head of one of the tournament organizers (though it's mostly obscured by a foreground element) that I only saw when watching the show on DVD since I don't think either YTV or Cartoon Network showed that in broadcast (with the possible exception of the Adult Swim run). Erm...himself*, him*, him*

This should help, Preston Blair's guide to lip-sync: But stuff like this is also context-sensitive. The R sound is one that I found often differs from what's here. A strong R will be closer to the U mouth but still with the clenched teeth of the R mouth. Also, try to hit the proper mouth shapes about 2 frames before the corresponding sounds.

Just Dance...uh...whichever one I played that one time (I think it was 2).

Looking at rough work (be it still art or animation) by some of the greats always makes me want to draw. Especially Disney, etc. pencil tests. Most of the stuff here: Watching this video just now makes me really wish it wasn't so late 'cause now I just wanna draw for hours. The Princess and the Frog blu-ray is also really good for this; it has a feature to watch picture-in-picture rough animation with the final film. Adjusting to drawing digitally is a hurdle for a lot of artists. You get used to the feel/texture of paper and pencil (and whatever else you happen to be using) and you gain something of an instinct based on it that helps you draw. When you move to digital tools, you kind of have to start over now that everything feels completely different. But you'll get there. It took me several months before I was totally confident drawing purely digitally.

Looking at the thread, looks like it doesn't have to be ponies, so I'm OK with that: This drawing is concept art for a short film I'm working on, and looking at it inspires me to keep working.

And that's completely true. Ignoring that Wind Waker ever got an HD re-release, the Gamecube original still looks like it could be a brand new game from a technical aspect*; high-poly environments and characters, high-resolution textures, good lighting, etc., the hardware of the system was all that was necessary to make that visual style look about as good as it can look. *Even moreso if you run it in 1080p through an emulator. Twilight Princess, on the other hand, looked dated the day it came out. It's one of those "pretty from afar" things. Up close: Muddy, busy, low-res textures, a palette so dreary the game might as well be monochrome, and some character models that would fit right at home on the N64. Ignoring the technical side, you can make up your own mind about the art direction. The art direction of the whole series is something I appreciate dearly, most of the games have their own specific look tailored to mechanics and themes in them (e.g. Wind Waker has it's fair share of silly mechanics; like using a giant leaf as a parachute; and the art style compliments them well).

Oy, I had a long reply typed out about working in Animate Pro and then I reread your post to see you're actually asking about how to do things in Flash. Whoops. But I can help you with animation fundamentals. You may be aware of some or all of this info already but I'm hoping this thread I made a while back can help you out anyway: http://mlpforums.com/topic/100863-animation-fundamentals/ The info is not Flash-specific but universal for animating in general.

So, I've been lurking this board for a while now, mostly because it's the type of content where I feel I fit in most, but also hoping something like this would come up. There have been some impressively large scale projects in the past, like Double Rainboom, that the fandom has created. However, a lot of the people trying to get projects started on here...kind of need a reality check. So much of it shoots right past ambitious and straight into delusional. Regular, long-running fan series and feature-length fan movies are just not going to happen. The kind of creative teams needed for such undertakings are quite a bit larger than people on this forum realize. And those people are much better off working on original projects anyway since that's what will get them noticed (and paid). While I can't speak genuinely for musicians or writers, I can for animators. The standard formula when working on a TV show has each animator responsible for 30 to 40 seconds of animation every week. I work on a show that started out with around 30 or so animators*, many fresh out of college. Despite the size of the team (which has since dwindled with some leaving for other jobs and some being let go), we have so far only actually made proper weekly quota once. The show's production schedule has been extended several times, and that's just something that happens. *And that's just animators. To say nothing to the director, designers, supervisors, line producer, layout artists, background artists, and storyboard artists involved. So I do tend to roll my eyes when I see threads asking for only a few animators to keep a weekly series going. Payment's also an issue. The nature of fan-made content means no money (legally anyway); the creatives have to be in it purely for their own emotional investment. There's nothing wrong with that, but if an animator has the opportunity to spend all their time on a fan animation, or go work for an animation studio and make a living employing their skill, they really should go for the latter. What's particularly irritating is when project leaders say the creative team will be "paid in exposure". I could rant for a while about how plain insulting that is, but other artists have done the same, and worded it better, before me: http://www.awesomelyluvvie.com/2014/10/dear-brands-pay-bloggers-exposure.html And, really, I'd encourage the aspiring animators on here not to work on fan animations. I can't stop you if there's an idea that you really love and want to be a part of, but I still say you should do your own thing instead. Same with the project leaders; work out something original. And pay your creative team. They deserve it.

Got myself a red one. Beautiful, glossy fingerprint-magnet. The head-tracking 3D is cool but it's a bit of a trade off. It uses the inner camera to track where your eyes are. So if anything briefly obscures your eyes or the camera, the 3D will malfunction for a split second. So if you habitually adjust your glasses, like I do, that can be a recurring thing. The C-stick could have been better. It functions well and serves its purpose, and I'm happy it's there at all. It's just somewhat uncomfortable and feels like, if I were to make copious use of it, I might get a blister on my thumb tip. But that will depend on how you naturally grip it. I personally wish they would have just made it a secondary circle pad, though I suspect they did what they did for the sake of space as the system's innards are already fairly jam-packed Playing Majora's Mask, like 90% of the time I used the C-stick to adjust the camera, it would briefly (2 frames-ish) flicker to an irrelevant angle before popping right back to Link. This could just be my copy, I'd have to play someone else's for a bit to know.

Twilight in 60 seconds. I ran out of time while I was drawing the cutie mark.

You're going to have difficulty finding professional grade animation software for $50. If you're willing to pirate...well, y'know. Speaking for 2D animation in general, I strongly recommend going for Toon Boom as opposed to Flash; it's a much more stable line of software. Toon Boom Studio (what I learned on in college and what I use at home) is about $250, and that's the cheapest full-featured animation program they have. And then Harmony (what we use at work) and Animate Pro are awesome, but way way out of your price range. Harmony's also really complicated to crack. However, if you are specifically interested in animating stuff that looks like MLP, it might be more convenient to use Flash anyway just because there are near-perfect copies of the character's Flash builds from the show available online. You could also try some of these: http://alternativeto.net/software/toon-boom-studio/?license=opensource http://alternativeto.net/software/adobe-flash/ I've never used any of those myself, I've found very few open-source alternatives to industry software that were actually any good.

Charles. About the only regal part of me.