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| Tweaking the news script | Jun 30, 2009 8:13 PM PDT | url |
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Updating the news script to support the new daily comics feature, you may see an odd end or two here for a few minutes. :o
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| And more news tweaks... | Jun 30, 2009 7:24 PM PDT | url |
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Time is backwards!~
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| News tweaks were here, too! | Jun 30, 2009 7:03 PM PDT | url |
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There was a *lot* of live testing to get the daily comic news thing working. ;)
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| A daily A* strip? | Jun 26, 2009 2:23 AM PDT | url |
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Would you be interested in being able to get new episodes of A* as daily non-animated "frames"--basically single panel, cinematic-format comics--*in addition to* the animated, audio-ified movie versions that come out after a month of drawing? 'Cause I'm thinking about doing 'em! Come join the debate on the forum; you'll even find a demo version of A* episode 1 as "dailies" there.
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| A* Episode 4 up for votes on Newgrounds | Jun 24, 2009 11:42 PM PDT | url |
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Episode 4 is now up on Newgrounds, where anyone with an internet connection can check it out and vote on it once per day in Newgrounds' unique peer review process. Episode 4 is making its way through the judgment process as I write this, with hundreds if not thousands of people giving it a going-over. Will it do better than episode 3, which has been the most successful for me so far there? Aah the suspense!
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| Ep. 5 WIP: Storyboards complete | Jun 24, 2009 11:15 PM PDT | url |
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Finished the storyboards for episode 5; as they stand now, I think doing all the frame-by-frame action shots they call for will be the death of me, but we shall see!
If you squint real hard you can almost see people in a few of these:
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| A* 1 GB Forum Party! | Jun 24, 2009 4:25 PM PDT | url |
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A few days ago I promised a forum party when downloads from my server in a single day would get to 1 GB of data, and we blew through that yesterday with 1.34 GB transferred, so--it's party time! The A* 1 GB forum party is right here, come join in or just watch the rest of us make fools of ourselves. =D
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| Ep. 5 WIP: Horrific storyboards | Jun 23, 2009 11:47 PM PDT | url |
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Got about 90 storyboards done today--only 50 left!--and found as usual that drawing that many pictures in a single day leaves me pretty brain-fried! Of course they're super-sketchy but as long as they capture the layout I want, and I can figure out what the heck they mean when I'm going through them for drawing the final art, then it's mission accomplished. So they aren't done for looks, and I hesitate to show them to the public, but ah, what the hell, most of you have seen plenty of rough behind-the-scenes stuff from me already. ;) So here are some boards from the first 2/3rds of episode 5:
PS: No, that is not Space Spider-Man!
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| Episode 5 script done | Jun 22, 2009 11:19 PM PDT | url |
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Here we go starting in on episode 5 already!
The question now is, what's Vero doing out in that asteroid belt around Gabbot's Claim? Oh yeah, and wasn't Solvan Mar, head of Core Sys Corp, trying to have people track him down and kill him?
Finished the script for the episode today. The best line I managed for this episode might be "Now let's cut you open and see what's inside." Wait, my crude side also kind of liked "Get lost before I give you a gigawatt the hard way."
Can you tell that episode 5 is going to have a lot of action? In fact I'm getting a little worried about drawing all of it now that I think of it, but hey, one frame at a time, right? ;D But first, the storyboards, which I'll start tomorrow.
Did no drawing today, so I'll leave you (courtesy of Wikipedia, NASA, and the Cassini orbiter) with one of the prettier pictures I turned up while researching planetary ring systems today; this is the Saturnian moon Enceladus, the sixth-largest moon of the sixth planet in our solar system, whose cryovolcanic activity spews ice crystals into space through four large vents in its south polar region, forming the ring in which it travels around the gas giant:
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| Zap gun for hire | Jun 21, 2009 4:30 PM PDT | url |
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I added the largest and most overproduced version of my banner yet to the icons and banners page.
This one is "leaderboard" size in advertising terms, and I made it for an ad campaign I'll be running intermittently on Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire, the web version of a cool sci-fi graphic novel by Phil Foglio that originally came out in the '80's; Phil and his wife Kaja have recently started putting the Buck Godot graphic novels up on the web for free, running alongside their main current project, Girl Genius (steam-punk, also very cool). Buck Godot is probably my favorite sci-fi comic ever, so I'm super-excited to have this A* banner showing at the top of the site as a sponsor!
Buck is quality stuff and gets multiple tens of thousands of views per day, so hopefully some of those sci-fi comic fans will dig A* as well. Buck Godot's adventures are mostly comedy, and they're a whole lot of fun, so check out the site if you haven't seen them before--or even if you have!
Hm... I nearly had just over 990MB of stuff downloaded from my web server yesterday, and the ad had only gone up at 10:30 am. I guess that means I'll hit a 1GB download day pretty soon! I may have to throw a little A* forum party when that happens. =)
~~~~
In case you're bored on this lovely Sunday & Father's Day, you could check out some other stuff I did this weekend:
- Newgrounds just added an "Art Portal" where users can upload artwork, so I filled my gallery up with high-res A* stuff, some sketches from my old Matrix Online days, and a page from my weekly Princess and the Giant webcomic.
- Speaking of The Princess and the Giant, page 4 of that little fairy tale webcomic of mine went up today. The princess enters a dark forest, O noes!
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| A* episode 4 is up! | Jun 19, 2009 6:32 AM PDT | url |
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A*'s fourth episode is out! You can view it on the A* site, collect it on deviantART, and check it out in HD on YouTube.
This episode features more animation, drama, carnage, and explosions than previous A* outings. It even answers the boxers vs briefs question! Is there anything A* episode 4 *can't* do?
Hm well it can't give me feedback, so you, noble viewer, must do that for me, or I'll never learn anything useful. Let me know what you think of this episode; if you have even the slightest nit to pick with it, or found some particular particularly nice, do let me know. And I hope that if you enjoy it, you'll share it with neighbors, family, and friends, shout it from the rooftops (minding your municipality's rooftop noise regulations), and so forth, so that A* can keep growing and eventually fulfill its destiny of swallowing our entire galaxy.
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| Ep. 4 WIP: Lots of voice recording | Jun 17, 2009 4:31 AM PDT | url |
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Voices are recorded, now it's just synching and music, pretty much. If no more summer barbecues or sudden urges to add RSS feeds for doodley comics crop up, I should have episode 4 finished off before the end of the week. Not-so-famous last words, I suppose.
Some sample voice samples from the ep. 4 recording sessions:
- Mick always has a hand in some fun
- I sure have a damn lot of trouble with Vero's swearing--even after a big swig of water for the throat (hah this one loops pretty well :P)
- finally managed to get that line
- Sal's voice
Hadn't intended for Sal to sound like he'd smoked quite that many cartons of cigarettes, or whatever the equivalent is in A* (?), but I was having a hard time disguising my voice with more moderate amounts of gravel. I guess I'm a little paranoid about it since last weekend some friends who'd listened to the episodes came up to me and were like "I recognized your voice!" which is the last thing someone who needs to play all the roles wants to hear! Gar.
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| Spammin' Banners | Jun 16, 2009 1:16 AM PDT | url |
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Added a couple banners to the icons and banners page:
[Edit 4/25/15: not sure where this old image went!]
The background is from the image I made for the "Miniposters Girl" contest. I made 'em for having snazzier stuff showing for myself on topwebcomics (hey you can vote for A*! :P) and Drunk Duck.
"Drunk Duck" is a (non-animated) webcomic hosting site, and my "in" there is the sporadic, non-animated comic I've been doing as a warm-up of sorts for A* drawing periods, The Princess and the Giant. So I had to make a few banners for that one, too:
[Edit 4/25/15: not sure where this old image went!]
Phew! Got my throat sore (as usual) doing Vero's louder lines for episode 4 today; tomorrow I should be able to finish up the softer stuff.
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| A* episode 3 in Italian by SEPET | Jun 12, 2009 3:50 PM PDT | url |
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SEPET has produced A* episode 3 in Italiano. He's been working to reconstruct the episodes very painstakingly from the .gif files, which is quite a bit of work! I think we've figured out a better way for him to do it, though, so if that works out, future translated episodes may have music and other stuff from the Flash versions in them, along with his Italian subtitles.
SEPET's been a big supporter of A* since the beginning, so thanks for that and for another translated episode, man!
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| Ep. 4 WIP: A triplet of snippets | Jun 12, 2009 4:06 AM PDT | url |
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Got the lion's share of the episode's animation put together; just one last scene to assemble, then it's on to voice work. Some fun animation snippets:
- Everyone knows that pushing the button repeatedly--and/or shouting--makes computers work faster.
- Do not attempt at home; this man is a zero-gravity expert.
- Know anyone who likes to take their frustration out on their keyboard? Not a pretty sight.
(In case you're viewing these from the forum or the news page and wondering why they flash a little "MOVIE" tag in the upper left corner at the beginning, and link to themselves when clicked, it's because these also go out via the RSS feed, and some RSS readers *cough* Facebook *cough* like to convert images to arbitrary sizes and formats, which reduces my animated gifs to a single frame. So in theory people viewing those will see a static image with the "MOVIE" tag in the corner, and can click it to view the animation they'd otherwise be missing.)
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| Ep. 4 WIP: Opening animated | Jun 11, 2009 1:20 AM PDT | url |
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A few weeks ago I showed you a test of a digital "static" effect I'd drawn for the opening of episode 4. Started animating everything together today, so here's the fully animated version of that opening shot, with "shaky cam" jiggling, etc; this takes up right where episode 3 left off:
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| Ep. 4 WIP: Last big art batch | Jun 10, 2009 12:20 AM PDT | url |
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Just half of one more shot to draw for episode 4, so I'll be finishing that tomorrow and then getting on to the animating. Some drawings from today:
Maybe looks a little familiar? We'll be seeing a lot more of that area in episode 5.
Vero contemplates a daring ensemble consisting of boxers and a giant helmet.
Sal says Eyyy, go for it!
But Vero is hesitant. How will this story end!?!?
Speaking of half-naked Vero pics, there's another one on deviantART.
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| Ep. 4 WIP: Credits deadline in 24 hours! | Jun 09, 2009 12:36 AM PDT | url |
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Just a reminder that if you'd like to get your name--and optionally your web site--in the credits of episode 4 for being an A* supporter, you'll need to hit up the gold button on the support A* page by the end of the day--Seattle time--today (Tuesday).
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Some drawings from today--getting close to done, maybe one or two days of drawing left for episode 4.
Happy trails, Mick!
Here's a new character we'll meet in episode 4: another shipper, named "Sal":
And Sal's ship:
The rejected "Star Trek" version :p:
And I put up a few high-res pieces on deviantART!
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| Ep. 4 WIP: Space warp? | Jun 06, 2009 2:57 AM PDT | url |
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Finally got that complicated zooming scene done after one false start where the meteoroids were moving at an unimpressive speed--had to draw more of them and scale them faster. Then I layers multiple frames over each other for a sort of image trails effect to smooth things out. The result:
Now, you could make a sorta interesting Star Warsesque space warp effect from that if you wanted to
(you'll need Firefox or something to see this at the correct speed; IE can't display animated gifs fast enough)
but of course there's no such thing as warp speed for space ships as far as we know, so that would just be silly, nevermind what else I posted on deviantART.
Kind of makes you wonder how people got to the vicinity of A* though, seeing as how it's 30,000 light years away from Earth. Hm...
Say, it's the weekend now. Have a good one!
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| Ep. 4 WIP: 2D rocket science | Jun 05, 2009 1:34 AM PDT | url |
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Let's join Mick rocking out in his cockpit:
Speaking of joining, The Gratuitous Lens Flare Club is now accepting applications:
Setting up another scaling perspective scene:
Working big again because Vero & Sig's ship has to start there in the foreground and fly off into the vanishing point. The rectangle slightly off-center around the vanishing point represents the border of what will be in the final animation (had to scale this way down so it would fit on the news page :).
I suppose there are all kinds of fancy ways to do perspective, I just use a stupid brute-force method involving the basic Windows calculator and a simple linear equation (aka banging on the "=" button repeatedly). For instance, here, the ship just butting into the lower-right corner of the frame is my start position, 100% scale. After some experimentation, I found that I want it to scale down to 1% of its starting size by the end of the shot, so it will just be a tiny dot in the vanishing point (if you look closely you might be able to make out the experimental 1% and 5% versions way back there).
Consulting my script, I see that this shot needs to last for...3 seconds. A* runs at 10 frames per second, so I need to find a scale factor which, multiplied against 100 29 times, gets me down to about 1. Banging away with some experimental multiples on the calculator (100 * x, then press = 29 times :P), I find that .855 gets pretty close (close enough for 2D rocket science!).
So, I'll copy my 100% ship layer 29 times, enter 100 * .855 in the calculator, and press "=" once for each of the 29 copy layers, scaling that layer by the result with Photoshop' 4's "Numeric Transform" function (looks like later Photoshops sort of broke that up into separate icky UI for each individual type of transform function, bleh!): frame 2 is scaled to 85.5%, frame 3 is scaled to 73.1%, etc.
Since this shot is straight single-point perspective, I won't have to nudge the scaled layers around, since the scaling operation will put them in a nice tidy line toward the vanishing point for me (I had to put little black dots at the corners of the image to get it to scale toward the canvas center—I'll have to remember to go in and delete those from each layer so they don't get in the way of stars or meteoroids). When I have to move something in perspective along a more complicated path/angle, like the escape capsule moving away from the ship in an arcing path like I showed yesterday, that can involve a lot of onion-skinning layers and trial and error animation tests until I get something that looks like smooth curving movement in perspective.
After the ship, I'll also have to scale the three separate layers of meteoroids, with their own scale factors appropriate to their speed/distance, and in reverse layer order since they'll be going the opposite direction (toward the camera). Composite the 120 scaled layers into 30 frames, add in some gas puffing out of the ship's ruptured reactor, and I'll be all done with another 3 seconds of episode 4!
... I think I won't have this many complicated scaling shots in another episode for a while. :p
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Whipped up a shorter version of the opening title sequence for episode 4: this speeds the animation up from 21 seconds to 6, so you won't have so long to wait to get into the episode; hopefully it's enough to establish the title and mood, but not so much that you get sick of it on repeat viewings. Sample:
https://smbhax.com/stuff/0004wip090604shortintro.swf
The blank time as the music winds up after the animation is where the "Episode X" captions and things will go.
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Also uploaded a couple high-res compositions starring the ever-lovin' Mick to deviantART.
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| Matrix fans: call me on my Matrixisms | Jun 04, 2009 3:17 PM PDT | url |
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Since we seem to have a lot of Matrix fans here (:)), I'm gonna ask you guys to help me out by pointing it out to me when you see me cribbing ideas from the Wachowski brothers, as it became a habit after five years of working in their world. Not that it's a habit I want to break, mind you--their work is some of the most visually inspiring stuff out there, and as a designer you'd be nuts not to take inspiration from it--but I do want to know *when* I'm doing it, at least, so that it isn't totally unconscious.
For instance, there are two I'm aware of in the past last week alone, from the news / Episode 4 work-in-progress thread. This
is totally the Kid plunging off his school's rooftop in Kid's Story from The Animatrix, and this one
is undeniably Neo zooming through the dark city streets to catch Trinity as she's falling from a building while being shot by an Agent in Reloaded.
These weren't apparent to me when I sketched them up for the episode in storyboard form, but they jump right out at me in the final art. So, thank you for the continued inspiration, Wachowskis, and viewers, don't be shy about pointing any other Matrixisms out to me so that I can be more aware of what I'm doing!
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| Tuesday Ep. 4 credit deadline | Jun 04, 2009 2:26 AM PDT | url |
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Sort of getting close-ish to finishing the art for episode 4, so I'm going to call this coming Tuesday, June 8th, as the deadline for anyone wanting to hit the support page and get themselves (and their web site) in this episode's credits as a super-cool A* supporter.
Hm... I suppose eventually I'll have to try hawking T-shirts or something too. =P
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| Ep. 4 WIP: Some FX shots | Jun 04, 2009 2:15 AM PDT | url |
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Did some sort of complicated (for me!) effects type scenes today.
Bogeyman's shadow!
Warranty expired?
I also have an extra, super-large picture of a certain escape capsule. Turned out to be slightly too angled to use in the previous shot. Why'd I draw it at 6000x6000? Well...I overestimated a bit. :P
I also put a high-res sort of compilation of that scene on deviantART.
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| Ep. 4 WIP: Doors & elbow grease | Jun 03, 2009 12:38 AM PDT | url |
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Faster.
Sometimes them doors stick a little.
Ooh yeah and I put one thing up on deviantART that I didn't show here yet since it's vaguely spoilerish maybe.
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| Ep. 4 WIP: Explosive workout session | Jun 01, 2009 11:22 PM PDT | url |
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Shadow highlight trick using a Difference layer:
That free font is called "Bombardier," by the way.
More motion blur effects:
Couldn't resist mashing up one of the scenes I drew today. Who's the strongest spaceman?
I also put a few high-res compositions up on deviantART.
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