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.

Most of the time I favorite things on deviantart just because someone not only thought to put the thing in a picture, but wasted a good amount of time actually making it.

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!

I think I’m going to post weird deviantart finds here. Honestly I hate the place but I think it offers insight into some perverse tendencies of young artists, especially those immersed in anime and other digital media. What I’m trying to say is… it’s relevant if you squint your eyes, I guess! Or slightly horrifying. I just always want to share the weird ones…

On a sort of related note, I just noticed that this character from Bleach named Hitsugaya seems to have been attracting a large fan base on deviantart, and I couldn’t help but notice that he bears an uncanny resemblance to another light haired boy I’m familiar with…

Maybe I’m imagining it… The one lick of hair does go in the other direction, I guess… Plus if I knew anything about anime I’m sure I could gripe for ages about characters that look like each other.

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.