germs & things

He has none! I’ll show you what I mean:

So yeah flash is working pretty well for me. But I have much catching up to do.

Hey there! Progress! This weekend I’ll hopefully be getting Flash and Photoshop on my tablet laptop so that means I can bring the joy of manual labor with me wherever I please! Well in the meantimes, Here is a background I did for the bathroom scene!

I wanted it to be textural to contrast the characters I’m doing in Flash:

This is, of course, just a test. I’d like to do shading but it would take too long. I’m hoping to sneak it into at least a few scenes though… But anyhow, the style was sort of inspired by Courage the Cowardly Dog!

I like it.

Here is some lovely After Effects scrolling action. The assignment was to animate a radio commercial.

Well… there you go.

In an alternate dimension where Armateddon is a TV show on Toonami (which still exists) and I’m rich and famous, they were going to have one of those awesome TV spot/music videos for it using Justice’s “Stress” as the song, but recently I’ve decided that I’d like them to use this song instead:

Like that ghetto music player I just made?? I’m too lazy to find a real one. Anyway… It’s nice to dream Really. I slept today!

Speaking of people trying to turn me straight… Chris Sanders almost did it!

Chris Sanders directed Lilo and Stitch, which I just watched twice for some reason. It’s one of my homework movies! And he also did the voice of Stitch himself, which I admire. Not so much because it’s a really hard voice to do (I can do it pretty well myself, thanks!) but because some of the lines are pretty emotional and I know from many experiences of directing and acting at the same time that having your crew watch you act is pretty nerve-racking. At least for me. I hate my acting. Oy…

Anyhow, I enjoy Chris Sanders’ style of drawing as it is “curvy and friendly,” and sort of “melts to the ground,” as the feature on the DVD repeatedly states. What you don’t see as much of in the movie is that lovely mix of cuteness and eroticism in these drawings. Obviously for a kids’ film they had to tone down the latter.

This short student film Jill sent me is strangely appropriate!

I’ve been watching the Sailor Moon transformations for “inspiration.”

Sailor Mercury… mmm yeahhhhh… Let’s go back there for a moment…

So recently (maybe not that recently) I went to go see Up! with some of my friends, which I actually thought was really entertaining, especially when it starts to get really ridiculous towards the end. But anyway, I was actually surprised that I found myself being more emotionally affected by the short before the feature than the feature itself. I found it on youtube, and it’s kind of bad quality, but you get the idea.

Actually I’m a sucker for stories about friendship and loyalty, so it’s not that surprising that I liked this better than the movie. But anyway, I always talk about hating the short format, but I know that working in shorts forces one to be more efficient and meticulous, while the freedom of feature length often causes one to become careless and self indulgent. The reason I think this short is so effective is that it’s simple and easy to follow. It uses no dialogue at all, it creates a good setup that you follow without thinking, and then it gives a payoff that’s unexpected and emotional. Good storytelling. Usually I think Pixar shorts are all about exhibition but I really think this one focused more on the narrative than the others.

My plan after my first short is to work my way up slowly to features, and while I’ve been kind of resentful towards this whole thesis process I know it’ll help me stay critical and effective when I get to bigger projects.

Hey there! Some people asked for the soundtrack for my project so here it is!

Armateddon Soundtrack (.zip)

I included two songs that were going to be in the movie before I cut it. I’m going to make words and stuff for the first one (”Stimulus”) and I’ll probably use it for the credits. I’m still not really sure whether I want to use that one or the other one.

Hello, whoever! I am attempting to finally revive this fucking thing!

This post, and most other subsequent posts to come (haha!) will be dedicated to my thesis project. I figure I should keep a log of my progress, so I can refer back if I ever lose sight of things, ya know?

My project is the first of a series of episodes called Armateddon. The protagonist is a boy named Ed. He has a twin brother who is very unfortunately named Ted and a younger sister named Ana. The three have been granted mysterious alien powers of transformation and are attending a special school to unlock their abilities under the training of a young man named Carlos and an alien named Demvulk6. While at school one day, Ted transforms, growing to twice his size. Meanwhile, a kid named Ian harasses Ed and humiliates him in front of his peers, accusing him of being gay. In confidence Ed tells Ted that he really is gay. Ted tries to help Ed by forcing him to confront Ian. In the fight that follows, Ted grows to even bigger proportions, and he, Ed, and Ana defeat Ian.

Here is the animatic. The audio is just a scratch track; I’m going to re-record the voices and hopefully they won’t sound quite as digitized.

I really hate the whole pitching process. Last semester I had a really hard time battling my anxiety over animatics and not wanting to change my idea to suit what my professors wanted. This semester I’ve tried to give the idea a little room to develop and it’s really proved quite useful so far. I’ve narrowed the story down to its bare essentials to make a much more efficient 7 and a half minute short (I’m pretty impressed by this considering that the idea started as a 20 minute TV pilot). The objective is to beat them at their own game and still accomplish what I want.

The reactions to the first animatic were mostly good. Everyone in my class seemed to really enjoy it. The only thing that was an issue, at least for my second critique with a guest animator, was that it’s hard to distinguish the characters from each other in the animatic since everyone looks very similar, especially if it’s the first time you’ve been introduced to the project. I’m hoping that color and redoing the voice-overs with two different people doing the twins will help make it clearer. But after this last critique in which the person watching the movie thought the story was about a set of fraternal twins and their large friend I’m a bit nervous now, or at least more resentful towards the animatic process. They’re great for planning and timing things out, but they’re not at all an accurate representation of the final product.

Well anyway, the review wasn’t bad, it was just a waste because the whole thing was based on miscommunication.

A few other details… All of the music will be done either by me or by my brother Richie, and I think I’m going to try having Richie also play Ted, rather than me playing both of them. Our voices are still pretty similar but slightly different. The whole thing is going to be hand-drawn but I’m not sure yet how I’m going to clean it up. I’ve tried using vectors with adobe illustrator, but that requires that I ink everything by hand, and very meticulously since fixing holes in the line work is annoying and complicated for me. Another option I have is to try to ink and color in flash. Otherwise I’ll just have to color in photoshop, which is also a long process but not as technically demanding, and I wouldn’t necessarily have to ink at all. I am pretty sure I’ll be doing the backgrounds in photoshop, and I’ll be compositing everything in after effects.

I’ll be playing around with different methods this week, so hopefully I’ll come to a decision and have some pencil tests and style frames soon.

Firstly I must apologize, as I just recently received a ridiculous influx of spam and in my panic I deleted all but I think 3 of the comments that were posted. But I promise you at least 50 of those actually were spam! Not kidding! So… you can thank me later.

Anyhow… I just scanned a shitload of drawings that should suffice for the amount of time I’ve been absent…

That’s just a comic I did one day in the cafeteria..

Then we have some of my sketch journal I’ve been keeping.

I did these back in October. I just figured while I’m sort of going backwards drawing-wise, I’d play around with my first drawn characters.

Next is a series of portraits I did in November.

Then, I started to play around with more abstract compositions. I did these with a sharpie.

And finally, we can’t forget about Thanksgiving, a time for the Manlapig Triangle to unravel the mysteries of the universe…