This is a great encapsulation of everything my waistline is going through.
Beyond being a wonderful snippet of Americana, the dog is perfectly animated, showing a great snapshot into this animal's life without fussing with any camera movements. Bravo.
In previous articles we've discussed a variety of ways to use your cartoons to make money, with the long-term goal of being able to support yourself full-time with your animation.
One of the first money-making ideas that many animators and cartoonists approach is making and selling customized T-shirts.
This article discusses the many customized T-shirt companies available to animators and cartoonists.
What Makes a Good T-Shirt Company?
To get a better idea of what to look for in good T-shirt company I spoke to Colin at T Round Up. They have a great collection of T-shirts and regularly showcase some of the best designs available.
Colin primarily looks at the printing techniques and T-shirt brand used when deciding on the overall quality of a particular company: "Personally, when looking at a company, I want one that will let me print on American Apparel shirts, as I find them to be the best out there."
"As for the printing techniques, avoid iron on transfers like the plague. Look for a company that offers plastisol ink (this is what Threadless.com uses), or something similar. Basically, you want a technique that will be both long lasting and soft. Don't try to cut costs by using cheap shirts or techniques. Find a quality site and stick with it, you will be better off in the long run."
With Colin's recommendations as guidance let's take a look at some companies that will let you customize your own t-shirts.
Before You Get Started
Understand that most t-shirt companies will require a vector version of your art before they can apply it to a shirt. This usually means that you need to use a program like Illustrator to create your design. The benefit of this extra step is that the final product will have clean lines and the design can be resized without any loss of quality.
Spreadshirt was the first t-shirt company that I tried when Calico Monkey started in 2005. It's an easy process to setup a new customized t-shirt, and they let you set your own prices. Theoretically you could list your shirts for $20,000 if you wanted to (that way you only have to sell one - ha!).
Spreadshirt wins extra points for hosting your customizeable store. You can add a header and footer to their theme and make it look like another page of your site, without the hassle of setting up your own eCommerce store.
Unfortunately there is currently no way to change the t-shirt manufacturer. This means that if you prefer a particular company, like Colin prefers American Apparel, you have no way to change that.
Additionally, having seen the final product in person I found their method of applying your design to the customized t-shirt is lacking in quality. It feels like a slight step above iron on transfers, and would degrade after only several washings.
Their user interface can seem a bit daunting to newcomers, but if you stick with it you'll pick it up in no time.
UberPrints does let you change the t-shirt manufacturer, allowing you to choose from American Apparel, Gildan, Hanes, Hyp and Anvil. Their user interface is fairly intuitive, but could use a facelift as it looks a bit dated.
They do not give you the option to create your own t-shirt store however. UberPrints will only ship to you directly, at which point you must deal with your customers yourself. There are inherent issues with such a system. You can make a good deal of money this way, but in order for that to happen you have to be shipping practically all the time. That's far too time consuming, and that's why big sites such as PVP and Penny Arcade started farming out this process.
Another site that does not allow you to create your own dynamic store, DesignAShirt is easy enough to use and includes several brands to choose from: American Apparel, Hanes and Alternate Apparel. The user interface could be easier to understand, especially for newcomers.
Also confusing is the lack of a "Sign Up Now" link, they have you start designing your own shirts before you complete your account information -- a bit backwards.
These t-shirt companies should get you well on your way and help you make your own shirts. Have you used a t-shirt company that's not listed here? Let me know in the comments below and I'll be sure to add it.
The episode of South Park that occurred the day after the election contained many scenes that directly referenced the results from less than 24 hours before the episode aired. How is it possible that they were able to create a full 22 minutes of animation in such a short time?
Shortcuts and Slight of Hand
The first clue that South Park was attempting something remarkable was when we first saw Obama's character appear in Grant Park giving his victory speech. It was striking how similar they were able to make the cartoon version of his stage match the real Grant Park location.
The visuals were not the only quick turnaround. Throughout the episode spoken references were made to speeches from the night before, both for Obama and McCain.
Spoiler Alert
While certainly many of the backgrounds had to be created in the 24 hour window, the primary storyline of the presidential nominees as jewel thieves could be animated without having to know who won the election. If you watch the scene where their explaining their scheme to the room for the first time they never make specific references to the election results. They use vague terms like "you two came up with this crazy plan 10 years ago?".
Intertwining the thief story with what the South Park boys were going through after the election lets you easily forget how much work they had to do in a short period to get the episode completed in time. I applaud their efforts to continue referencing current events, something I appreciate far more than their storied controversial episodes.
As this cartoon starts to play you may think this is a repeat. No actually, I combined each of the four Rock Band cartoons into a single long episode. The new animation is in there, it's just at the end. I also combined all of the user comments into this single entry.
Taking a Break From Animation
Yes, that's right, I'm taking an extended break from animation. I'm almost finished with an SEO application I've been working on and the cartooning takes up more time than I have right now. I will still be writing articles about cartoon software and animation programs, but this is the last new cartoon for a while.
To celebrate I decided to actually animate the monkey from the logo for the first time. For the record his name is Scribbles.
Stephen Sloan is a Toon Boom animator with some wonderful cartoons on his site, Upon Animation. This week he released an amazing music video for a song created by Kupek, the band of Bryan Lee O'Malley. If you're not familiar with O'Malley's work I highly recommend his Scott Pilgrim comic book series, due out as a movie starring Michael Cera in 2009.
Stephen was kind enough to answer some questions about the music video.
Can you please tell us how you came to start on this project?
I had decided that I was going to be taking a substantial break from the studio animation industry to pursue a career creating my own shorts. I needed some sort of test, or exercise to flex my creative muscles. I figured a music video would be Ideal, mainly because I wouldn't have to worry about the audio.
Please take us through the broad steps you took create the video.
Well, first I listened to the song a bunch, stared out into space and waited for whatever feelings or visuals the song would manifest in my mind. I organized them into kind of a series of scenes VERY loosely interconnected by a main character. I did some rough thumbnails of the shots I wanted to include, some were cut for pacing and others were added later to help the flow. Since I was the only one working on this project I didn't bother with an animatic, it was all there in my brain.
What software did you use?
Toon Boom Studio 3.5 for all the animation. I'm looking forward to upgrading to 4.5 soon. I also used TBS for any lighting effects. The backgrounds were all painted in Photoshop and the whole thing was 'Composited' in QuickTime Pro. (Drag and drop, that's about as fancy as my editing gets.)
The music is given away for free by Bryan Lee O'Malley at radiomaru.com. Did you (or somebody) contact him before creating the video for his blessing?
I knew I was going to be hearing this music A LOT, so I wanted to be sure I chose a band who I listen to fairly regularly. And because I thought that I might like to submit this to some online festivals, I figured I'd find someone pretty Indy. I contacted Bryan and asked if he would mind if I made a video based on some of his music, originally it was going to be 'Cats' or 'She's an Invalid' both catchy tunes with great opportunities for visuals, he mentioned that he had a new album coming out around the end of summer, and that if I was interested, I could do something for that. He was nice enough to provide multiple versions of the song as he worked on it and even provided some musical notation for the piano part, so I could properly sync the hand to the keyboard.
As far as copyright issues go... I'm not really in a position to give any advice. There were no contracts involved here. The video shouldn't be construed in any way as being an official Kupek video, or being 'blessed' by Bryan or anything. The video exists purely as a fun exercise/promotional piece, which I hope other people might enjoy watching, or at least enjoy the song.
Finally, given all your hard work, did you enjoy creating this great music video? Is it something you would do again if given the chance?
I had a great time with the video. I tried out a bunch of new techniques that will be following me onto my next project. I got to feel accomplished for finishing something that's all my own, and not part of an assembly line production. I learned a lot, and I know I'm doing at least one other Music Video, with which I'll be taking a different approach based on those lessons. I have however, had to delete every version of 'Monday Morning' from my itunes. As good as it is, I'll be needing a bit of a break from it.
Thank You!
We appreciate your time in answering our questions. If you found Stephen's work to be as interesting as I did, I recommend following his blog.
