Video Animation, as not in sprite

Hey there! I bought Aseprite pretty recently, and I really like it!
This is also my last year of highschool, and I wanted to show an animation I made in the talent show, but I wanted to go beyond just a good sprite animation.
I wanted to make a fully animated video, with sound effects and etc, my idea was to take a D&D session I played and turn it into something that would look a lot like a rpg or metroidvania, as if it was an actual game that you could actually play.
I don’t want to make the game, I just want to do an animation.
However, I don’t know how I can do any of that.
My maximum time for the animation would be 3 minutes, as this is the time limit for the talent show.
Does anyone have any idea of how I can do that? If yes, thank you.

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Hi Outerst, and welcome to Aseprite community! :smiley:

I would recommend the following steps (I assumed that you are not rich and pointed to free/open source software, which doesn’t mean that they are bad programs, at all):

  1. Organize your work. Create deadlines. Make storyboards (just fast drawings in paper is fine) and use them to calculate the timings and divide the full video into short scenes.

  2. Work on these scenes separatedly in Aseprite. You can use a small canvas size while you are animating (preferably something with 16:9 ratio, for example 480x270, or 240x135), but when you export the animation you’ll need to resize it (for example to 1920 x 1080, using “sprite>sprite size” and “nearest neighbour” in Aseprite) so that the video editing software doesn’t create horrible image artifacts that ruin your video, so your files will be be big at some point (and even bigger if you use too much layers for parallax backgrounds, or diferent characters or anything else). So, “divide and rule”.

  3. Make backups of your work all the time (seriously, do it). My recommendation is that you use some version control system, preferably an automated one such as Dropbox.

  4. When you have finished an animation, export it from Aseprite using “save as” and “.gif” as extension. Then resize it to fit the size of the video project (as I wrote before).

  5. Sounds and music: You can get the sounds from any free sound bank, or create them yourself using your PC microphone (or your smartphone) and editing them with Audacity.

  6. Use Shotcut to edit the video and mix it with the audio (you’ll need to look for some tutorials on youtube to use it, but it’s quite easy). First of all you’ll need to choose the project’s “video mode”, choose “HD 1080p 24fps”, then import the gif file (drag and drop to the left). You’ll be asked to convert to edit-friendly, click on “ok”, after the converting is done, double click on the finished job (right side of the screen), and in the timeline, click on the “plus sign” (“append to the current track”). From here you’ll have to find and learn from the tutorials :wink:

I hope it helps! Good luck and have fun! :smiley:

3 Likes

Thanks a lot! That’s going to be very helpful!
I’ve never heard of Shotcut, I’ll look into it :smiley: Thank you so much!!

1 Like

No problem, I’m glad to help! ^^