7th Monk Media
Hello! My name is Daniel S. Ferebee and I am a retired school teacher living on the east coast of the United States. I have been involved in the creative arts for more than 20 years now. The content I develop includes graphic design, photography, music production, illustration, animation, voiceover and character design.
When I first started working, creating content with digital technology was not a part of the process. However, now I constantly look for ways to merge traditional design techniques with digital design tools!
Most of all I love to create characters for animation! CrazyTalk Animator has been and will continue to be a great asset within my box of tools for doing the work I love.
Q: Hi there, can you tell us a little about your background and your work? Also, please share when and why you start working on 2D graphic design?
Aside from studying many of the art and drama courses offered in our public-school system before heading to college, I was always creating little projects on the side to satisfy an overly creative mind.
With overwhelming support from my mother, I kept very busy developing my skills in visual arts, music and photography. While in primary school, I discovered comic books and fell in love with the simplistic styles of art that expressed so much power and energy to tell a story.
I found myself mesmerized and began creating stories of my own and came up with all sorts of characters to aid in telling those stories.
Even though this took up a lot of my time, I still found time to do illustrations of family members from old photos. After one of my mother’s associates asked to buy a drawing of my youngest brother, I realized that I wanted to make a living creating art for others.
After entering high school, I learned about a graphic arts program and enrolled immediately. Learning the new skills associated within this field of study, I knew right away this was what I wanted to do. Since that time, I have been constantly honing my skills and challenging myself to learn as many forms of art as possible. I did not want to limit myself to any one particular ‘style’.
Q: Please tell us how you started your content business, and why you chose to use CrazyTalk Animator.
I have always found the internet to be an invaluable resource for locating interesting software to help with many creative endeavors. So, I began searching for something that would help streamline my workflow and speed up the process from concept to delivery.
The software would have to be easy to learn so that I could quickly begin creating animations for telling stories, delivering messages or educating children and adults. I needed something that would simplify many aspects of the process such as lip sync and repeated motions. I had already been using CrazyTalk for a couple of years before discovering CrazyTalk Animator (CTA).
Aside from being able to purchase content within the Reallusion Store to add more capabilities to a character, the CTA3 software also allows me to create my own library of custom movements and other assets such as props and accessories.
After using CTA2 for a while I became familiar with it enough to rely on it in daily production. When CTA3 came out with the ability to import character designs from Photoshop, it was like a match made in heaven.
The variety of characters and animation styles became limitless. CTA3 will continue to be a part of my pipeline for production as well as for creating content for others to use for their own productions.
Q: Besides CrazyTalk Animator, what other software do you use? Any samples of your work?
In addition to CTA3, I also use Moho Studio Pro [formerly known as Anime Studio].
Depending on the tasks, sometimes I might use the software packages in conjunction with one another because of how well I believe they complement each other.
A few animation examples can be seen here on this demo reel:
One of my first long animations (with Anime Studio) that was over 2 minutes, involved a piece that was not created for a client or students. It was a short holiday story created for my daughter. I wanted to test how quickly I could output a piece of work from concept to completion within a limited time window.
Although the software was able to accomplish the task very quickly for a one-person production team, there were definitely areas where CrazyTalk Animator would have made a huge difference. Things like repeating motions, lip sync and efficiency of navigating the timeline are a few examples. Now I can’t really say that either one of these software tools are better than the other. It’s kind of like building a house with a hammer, saw and screwdriver. Although they are all tools, they each perform certain tasks a bit differently and sometimes they do so with greater ease than their companion tools.
Q: Thank you so much for sharing all of this. In the near future, what else can the community expect to see from you?
Aside from sharing my current creations that will be available in the Content Store, I plan to develop many more sets of characters and accessories that cross genre and design styles such as anime, realism, science fiction and more animal styles. I will also be using the CrazyTalk Animator software as a tool for creating children’s books. Being able to pose the characters and not have to re-draw them over and over will save me huge amounts of time throughout the series of books. This also will aid in any animated content needed for the promotion of the books since the characters will have already been developed for print.
In collaboration with several associates, I recently began the preproduction phase for the development of a series of graphic novels that will utilize 3D characters produced with another Reallusion software, iClone.
Here is a sample image of one of the characters.
The attire will constantly be changing and there will be approximately 8 to 10 main characters in addition to less important. For many years, this project has had to wait on the back burner because the team vision was a bit ahead of the tools needed to create something that would represent our talents without producing something that was of substandard quality.
Now technology and a talented team with be working together to produce many exciting creations in the near future! So stay tuned!
Thank you for the interview. Also, don’t forget to check out my store at the Reallusion site for lots of awesome CTA content.
============================================================================
To see more of 7th Monk Media’s work, visit >>
Official site: https://www.7thmm.com/
Reallusion Content Store: https://www.reallusion.com/contentstore/featureddeveloper/profile/#!/7th-Monk-Media/CrazyTalk%20Animator
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0yqpkfTT8vVEj9BOinUlO
1 comment