I realized a long time ago that this was way too much work for me to do alone, yet the artwork, and most or all of the drudge-work in Photoshop, really has to be done by me, so the actual animation, lip sync and all that, I need good people working on it. I'd really appreciate your help.

What I would like to do is get some or all of Evil of the Daleks 7 animated. Adam Bullock has done a lot of 3D work on it, and Aaron Climas did some 3D Dalek scenes for it ages ago, so there's certainly stuff to work with. I have obviously drawn a lot of characters who aren't in Evil of the Daleks 7, and I'd like to get some animation tests of those done too if and when any are finished in full in Photoshop - the sort of thing I can put together as a trailer for the BBC. In fact, a guy named JD Burton was working on Tenth Planet 4 bits with my sprites, so I did some work on that story.

So yes, Evil of the Daleks 7.

Write me, and I can send you video, audio and script reference for this episode.

Okay, now for the artwork. Go into the directory
http://ffrevolution.com/whosprites
New images will be posted here:
http://orangecow.org/who-sprites2

And download all the images of the specific character you want to animate.

I recommend that you start by using characters who have already been completely finished by me in Photoshop. Those will be easiest to start with. I intend to finish every character in Photoshop eventually.

Here's a list of those finished characters, all are in the FIRST whosprites directory at ffrevolution:

Troughton Six
Hartnell Five
Victoria (1)
Jamie Two
Edward Waterfield (1) .... Listed as "Eotd-Waterfield"

Each of these characters have a series of finished, color heads you can download as JPEGS. Download all those heads. The filenames will say "head" in them. And download the JPEGS which say "headless" - those are the bodies for the characters.

Each head has a different expression on it. All have different mouths, half have different eyes. You should be animating the heads and eyes separately.

Use the soundtrack to any lost episode. Every few frames or so, switch to a different head, to match the lip sync on the audio. Make the mouth movements match what you hear.

Have a look in the 1videos directory of whosprites and watch the videos that have already been done, to see what the animation is supposed to look like.

I animated my tests in Final Cut Pro - JD Burton did his in Flash. Flash is probably better to use, but I rarely use it, so I didn't this time round. You can do them in whatever program you like.

Every JPEG of the finished "head"s and "headless" bodies are on a bluescreen or greenscreen so you and your computer know what to cut out.

You can actually just animate the heads, static, on that blue or green background, getting the lip sync right with the head itself not moving at all, and then figure out the body and head movement later, as well as what the background will be.

What I did when I animated my tests was -- I did the heads first. The lip sync. I didn't worry about the bodies or having any movement to the head. I worked in PAL, at HD resolution, using the PhotoJPEG codec. I put every different drawing I'd done in a row, a bunch of heads filling up the frame, each lasting 3 frames apiece. I rendered that out as an HD-sized video, imported it back into the program, and then just edited it like I'd edit any video. I played around with the lip sync until I felt it matched the audio. Then I did a separate pass for the eyes, on a different video layer. I cropped each image somewhere around the nose, so that I'd just have the eyes on this layer, and then put in simple blinks and eyebrow movements or whatever.

I now had a static, large head which did perfect lip sync (and eye movement) to the soundtrack. I rendered this out as its own HD PhotoJPEG video, imported it back in, and started a new video ...

At this point I could work in SD resolution rather than HD if I wanted. Now I'm just making very simple movements of the head (which is the video I just rendered, with bluescreen to remove the blue/green background), as well as simple movements of the body (also bluescreened to remove the background), and a static background.

I don't have a lot of backgrounds ready so you could just render the head alone, or the head with a body, against the blue/green background, and I could chromakey it later.

Using PhotoJPEG codec is nice. It's a nice codec.

As for the other character drawings, they are currently posted as line art, and sometimes also as a greyscale or color version of one of the drawings. This means that I have not yet posted fully-Photoshopped versions of them. In Photoshop I apply color shading to every single line art drawing, one by one. This takes ages, but I'll get round to doing it for every character.

I post a generic "color layer" separately which can be placed under the line art for each frame to get a finished Photoshop version, but it does need tweaking for each different drawing.