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.

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.

This post, and most other subsequent posts to come 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).

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…

That’s my working title for the big movie movie. I’m still writing the script, or more accurately I’ve been gathering ideas and making little notes and pictures but not really writing anything at all. The problem is I was rolling along really nicely over the summer, gathering a lot of momentum. But then I got slowed down when I left my internship (which was where I got the most writing done), and then my thoughts started changing. Now I’m constantly struggling with reconciling the original story with my new ideas. I’ll go into more detail on the current story’s weaknesses later, but for now these are some early character sketches. None of them are really definite yet, except for Roy, Jeremy, and Father Bear.

Nate

Nate is always horrified at something..

Father Bear

Elise and Lily

Roy and Jeremy

Kane

Damien and Lara

Working on getting the website up. In the meantime, you can enjoy this blog, which took me pretty much all day to figure out how to get on my dino domain. But now it’s mine! All mine!

Here’s some new drawings. I’m trying to do at least one a day.