Double-click the green flag to begin! If you have not read Beanworld, you should watch the Teaser Trailer here: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/199752552/ before you watch this animation. Fullscreen is highly recommended. You can access Fullscreen by clicking the blue rectangle in the top-left corner of the project. The runtime is about 3½ minutes, but it varies depending on the speed of your device. When the animation is done, try pressing the 'f' key for a surprise!
I began this animation seven long months ago. It is my take on "Yeah, Yeah! The Clang Twang!," an issue of a comic book called Beanworld that is written and illustrated by Larry Marder. Getting to work with the world that he created has been one of the greatest parts of this experience and I am very grateful that he took the time to build such an immersive universe. Working with the Mr. Spook, Proffy, and Boom'r Band character designs was absolutely thrilling. The simplistic style of Mr. Marder's drawings is one that lends itself to animation very well. All I had to do was create one basic model of everything: one mystery pod, one ground, one Mr. Spook pose, one Proffy pose, one Boom'r, etc. and make slight modifications to them from there. All of the dialogue in the animation is from "Yeah, Yeah! The Clang Twang!" itself, as are most of the 'camera' angles. Like I said in my Gunk'l'dunk Speedpaint https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/152650052/ , reading Beanworld is a completely unique experience that I highly recommend. There were several things about Scratch that I learned or first utilized during the creation of this project. While developing the various Costumes, I zoomed in a lot in the Paint Map Editor to work on details. This method will probably be put to good use in future speedpaints. I also discovered that you can drag'n'drop Costumes from your Backpack into other Costumes, which came in handy while trying to combine Sprites for efficiency. Something else I experimented with was simulating camera movements even though there wasn't a camera. I created zooming in, zooming out, and camera-over-the-shoulder-shot effects by using Motion Blocks. Because the Beanworld aesthetic is more curvy than blocky, I had to invent something I call The Four-Point Curve, in which I delete all but four points of a circle using the Reshape tool and then overlap two opposite points to create an arc that I can then move around and Reshape. Some of my favorite parts of this animation are the impact symbol that appears when Mr. Spook whacks the chip, the Boom'r's expanding speech bubble, and the close-up shot of Mr. Spook. A lot of thought was put into the distinct style of this project. I deliberately decided that it would be very different from my last big animation, Particle Man AMV: because I wanted to try something new and explore different ways to animate. Some of the noticeable style choices in Animated Beanworld include the absence of Scripts in the Stage and a tendency to use Costume changes instead of Motion Blocks (a technique closer to what you might call traditional animation). One thing that I've learned from creating both an AMV (animated music video) and a soundless animation is the pros and cons of each. In an AMV, you have to sync the animation with the music, which is difficult to do and can cause problems on a laggy computer, but you can have action happening while audio plays, so the pacing is easy to balance. In a soundless animation, you don't have to sync video and audio, but you have to include time for the audience to read the speech bubbles, so the pacing can feel skewed because it alternates between a lot of action to none at all. I have some ideas for how to fix this dilemma that I will try to implement in the next episode of Animated Beanworld. Speaking of sound, my challenge to all aspiring sound engineers is to Remix this project and provide your own audio for it; I think it would be a very interesting exercise in sound design. At some point, I plan to continue making Animated Beanworld episodes and eventually finish animating all of "Yeah, Yeah! The Clang Twang!" (I predict it'll take about six more installments to complete) but first, I'm going to try to create an animation with a completely original screenplay. I know I've written the equivalent of a small novel in this Notes and Credits section, but if you're still reading and if you enjoyed the animation, I'd appreciate it if you love, favorite, follow, and maybe consider suggesting this project to be Featured. Self-promotion is not my strong suit, so some front-page time would go a long way in helping me grow on Scratch. With a Hoo-Hoo-HA and a Hoka-Hoka-HEY! ~Milkshake-Man-V
