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.

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.