Category — Filmmaking

Inking progress on Scary Monster Vs Lucky Frog this past week has been excruciatingly slow. Real Life has been tossing me just enough adventure to keep me on my toes and away from the drawing table. I’ve also been putting constraints on the amount of time I spend in front of the computer, to keep the migraines down to a dull roar. Of course, my brain is doing its best to drag things out even further by scheming and plotting loads of stupid little projects whose only goal is to waste time. In short, not a banner week…

I’m hoping this week sees an improvement, but I’m not putting down any money on it.  We shall see…

Coming up for air for a spell.  Honeymooning with the iMac is more like a working vacation where you get to go to Aruba but end up locked in a conference room filled with sweaty meatheads for eighteen hours and never see one lousy beach.  But it’s Aruba, so you shouldn’t complain…

The pre-compiled versions of POV-Ray and MegaPOV - my animation axes of choice - for Mac OS X Leopard are huge disappointments. POV-Ray just flat-out doesn’t run at all — per the developers, it’s Apple’s fault — and they changed MegaPOV so it no longer uses saved preference files. What the …??? Why the HELL did that do that??? That’s just plain stupid. Fortunately, there’s source code, so I now have Unix command-line versions of both progs that run at least 25% faster than the pre-compileds (I have no numbers to back up this claim, but I can see it with me own eyes, and since it’s my website I can pull whatever number I want out of thin air and that’s all there is to it!)…

Another MegaPOV annoyance is the lack of Quicktime support. When I run MegaPOV on my old G3, I can opt to save my images as a Quicktime movie, which is important since, well, you know, I’m a moviemaker. The new version of MegaPOV won’t do that, and I see no reason to kick out another thirty bones to Apple for functionality their program should have in the first place (not to mention the chunk of change I’ve already dropped to get the iMac). To get around that, I’ve employed MPlayer, the movie player and encoder of choice amongst Linux-heads. My first experience with MPlayer two years ago, when the G3 was sporting Debian Linux, was an ugly mess, mainly because I’m a moron and had no idea what I was doing. This time around, I’m getting muuuuuuch better results (even though I’m still a moron). So, problem solved…

I just about have all the necessary tools in place to get rolling again on Scary Monster Vs Lucky Frog. Still looking at June sometime, although I’m thinking it’ll be more towards the latter half of the month…

Last week I found myself beset with vision problems (double vision, inability to focus) and throbbing headaches. My boss at work thinks they’re migraines; I think it’s just overwork. Too many long workdays starting at a computer screen, followed by too many long worknights of the same…

So, this past weekend I shut down all the computers and cozied up with some sketchpads, writing notebooks, and pencils. Smartest thing I’ve done in weeks. Besides having my vision return to normal and making my headaches go away, I was able to work on sketches and keyframes for Evolution, as well figure out some production schedule changes for the films after Scary Monster Vs Lucky Frog.

I’ve also begun looking at some changes to the way we do business in general — less emphasis on hard deadlines, more emphasis on production-based design. Steve Ogden’s Moon Town production blog and podcast has been full of useful information on running with a production-based design philosophy. I did something similar with Break Time, and it worked really well, but for some stupid reason I haven’t been following it lately. Anyway, I hope the changes will allow for more productive studio time, without making me want to shove my head in a bucket of water and take deep breaths. And I need to have more fun doing this. Making myself partially blind and totally psycho is not fun…

Since I’m trying to slow things down to a more manageable level, the original June release date for Scary Monster is up in the air. Like I’ve mentioned previously, it’ll get done when it gets done…

Here ya go — your first glimpse of the next Goofy Graffix short, Scary Monster vs Lucky Frog:

This clip is from the pencil sketches I finshed last weekend. Don’tcha just love my cute fluffy little clouds? The shot of the monster walking down the sidewalk towards the house is missing the clouds floating overhead — those will be added at the coloring stage since I will need to do it for every single frame and I haven’t decided what color the cloud outlines will be. You’ll also notice the monster is walking through the house walls. Obviously, he won’t do that in the final cut, unless he’s a ghost. And no, there’s no audio in this section, so that’s why you’re not hearing anything.

I have four scenes inked now. Between scenes 3 and 4, there were 84 separate poses/layer elements to ink. That’s only about ten less than the entire How Space Wars Begin short. The movie is about 70- to 80-percent edited — minus titles and credits, it’s already sitting at around 2:15, which is as long as Revenge of the Ladybugs. That means when it’s finished, it’ll be the second-longest Goofy Graffix short, after Break Time. In other words, a June release date is not out of line. I’m a lot less grumpy with myself now…

In the past three days, I’ve gotten one and two-thirds scenes inked for the ‘Scary Monster 2′ movie. At that rate, with nineteen and a third scenes remaining, I’m looking at the end of April to have inking completed. Then tack on another month for coloring, probably another two weeks to deal with audio, final edit, blah blah blah…

Hmmm… looks like a release sometime in June…

June?!?!?!

Do you see?? Do you finally get it?????? I wrote “mid-May” as a release date in my previous blog, and in an instant, before I have a chance to turn around and scratch my butt, the release date jumps up a whole month! Just like that. Magic. Gotta be magic. Black magic, maybe???? Maybe a gremlin running around with nothing better to do? What’s that, Mr Gremlin? You don’t have a church to burn down, or a busload of orphans to send over a 100-foot cliff?? No problem — there’s an animator trying to figure out a production schedule who’s just dying to have someone give him a wedgie. Have at it!

He needs to find a girlfriend or something. Seriously.

Well, whatever’s causing it, I’ve learned my lesson. No more ‘tentative’ release date announcements or half-witted gazing into crystal balls. Every time I do that I look like a bigger idiot than I truly am. The damn thing will be done when it’s done.