Welcome to TVPaint Community forums !

I would like to show you my recent WIP. It's planned as an ebook.

Assuming that not much of you have Kindle or an iPad able to read epub-format, I made a transform to pdf-format. Unfortunately this comes with some restrictions:
- animated turning pages are not available which are in epub-ebooks-format.

- films in pdf, if embedded, are compressed Flash-like, it gives jiggling lines and some unwanted blurring which are not occurring in ebooks-epub format (<- mp4 files)

- you need Adobe Acrobat X-Reader ( I think it would be best to update anyway), which is of course free. Please don't use Mac-pdf- standard- reader which can't play animations, because it is not willing to load any plugins.

The pdf-file is 32 MB.

Here is the link:
http://www.khoefs.de/new/rural02_feb12.pdf
This wip has four pages by now: 1. Title, 2.Preface, 3. the film (with navigation controls) 4. First Chapter introduction.

Story.
It is the story of Ruth, the youngest sister of four. Her father is a practical and strong man and they are all living on a small farm, having rather hard work every day.
Ruth feels attracted to a passionate and dreamy young man from the neighbor farm. No wonder, there is a persistent conflict between her father, her sisters and the young man. Ruth seems to stand neutral, but one day she runs away with her lover, they are starting their own life with building up a little house in the woods. Although they have good days, finally it has to come to a crisis.

This is an interesting experiment and I think you are onto something because you have incorporated some new approaches to animation which are dictated by the nature of the new medium. That I think is the most valuable part of your work. Recently I completed some Internet targeted commercial work for a drug company, which they treated quite stupidly as television, including making me animate at 29,970 fps.

Your work shows a good understanding of the peculiarities of the digital reading devices and I am predicting that this intelligent primitivism is going to attract more paying customers than any animation made to bring out the predictable grunts of the un-literati such as; Cool, Awesome, Cool, Powerful, Explosive, and of course Cool, because it lives on loud sounds and is fast paced animation painted in primary colors (all three of them and read; easy to animate) that it can't sustain the interest of anyone over 10 yrs old and certainly no one willing to pluck down a buck.

The trick is to hold the reader's interest for the entire five to six minutes per installment it has been proven an Internet surfer wants to spend on a single subject, which means that the author has to keep the sound and the visuals interesting, not so much cool and explosive, which are just different expressions of banal and long past its interesting period. This is where I have trouble with your sound track; I don't understand much of what you are singing. It was a relief when the butcher towards the end came out with cartoon-like balloon words so strange yet so easy to understand that I was happy to be given enough time to read them again a couple of times. I think you are missing out on the lure of readers of books, including e-books, which remains the printed text. I like the melody and the delivery of the song which matches the nature of the story, but I just don't like to have to strain my all my attention trying to understand the words (is it just me? Could be.)

The animation of the miniatures is charming (the little people busying themselves around their houses, bicycles and automobiles). The animation of some of the larger drawings I have problems with because at that size the intelligent carelessness which brings charm to your miniature drawings, creates a feeling of sloppy incompleteness when drawn at full size. I particularly cringed at the digitally created expressions of the face at the end -- is it really easier to make a face move that way rather than the old way of hand drawn inbetweening? To me this was a spoiler because the entire chapter was obviously put together by a person who loves to draw. Your digitally animated face at the end said to me; but not for too long.

To make your WIP available to all of us on these pages is an act of courage, which is proven by the fact that not one member of this special interest group has yet commented. I see one of the purposes of the pages of TVPaint's forum to be a showcase of the enormous variety of possibilities of expression this versatile software has to offer -- yet if someone makes public his ongoing experiment which reaches out to the frontiers of the new media and actually touches it but it doesn't match with the word cute, no one here has anything to say?