At 9/12/09 09:47 PM, InnerChild548 wrote:
Sprites are boring and unoriginal.
It depends on the person who did it. A lot of spriters can add originality to their sprite animations by creating custom sprites. I think it's awesome when customs are made, it makes the animation twice as good, and there is usually more special effects (for lack of a better phrase) in the movie.
Spriting is also a great way to catch attention. Many, MANY people (particularly 13 year old boys) enjoy seeing their favorite video game characters in an animation. It's kind of like an extension to a game that you don't want to end. Plus, sometimes it's easy to turn a simple game for children into a funny adult-content Flash by twisting around original game content (eg mushrooms in Mario).
If you think about it, using sprites is a great idea for getting viewers. This is probably the reason why many legit animators are pissed. Their hard-work is getting blown off for a movie with Mario in it. A legit animator will then just put down anything sprite-related and use words such as 'unoriginal' and 'overused' (which is true in the majority of cases).
At this point, there isn't much else to do with sprites, which is probably why the idea is dying down. There have been so many movies and games that it's hard to create an original idea with sprites. People have already done numerous music videos, action-packed fight movies (Rise of the MK, Power Star, etc), bloopers, mushroom jokes, and all the rest. People get tired of these themes after a while. The animators eventually figure this out and overall production goes down.
At 9/12/09 09:47 PM, InnerChild548 wrote:
You hardly call yourself an animator if you do them, because you're basically putting together piece of cut-out-for-you animation. Takes hardly any skill.
This is just an opinion. You can say this about a lot of the sprite movies out there, but then there are others that have a lot of work put into them. If you see something like Power Star (or related), you will probably just say "Fuck this, it's unoriginal and there's no skill involved. Learn how to draw". However, the author (in this case, Daniel Sun) put a lot of effort in, rather than just copy+pasting the sprites and creating little sequences of back and forth banter. There is also a great story line, which can help remove thoughts of the technique and style of animation.
long post is long