Hands-On

I totally forgot to upload this Monday.  Wow.  I'm scatter-brained.

Matt Owl asks "Am I in the right century?"

In other news, today I applied for my degree conference (did I spell that right?).  If all my records are filled out correctly, and everything administration wise goes right, then an official paper that says "B.A. in Animation" should come by Christmas.  (I hope.)

In the mean time, I have the supreme hilarity of having a Motion Capture class and a Hand-Drawn Animation class back-to-back.  Yes, I go from the most automated form of animation to the most hand-crafted form of animation within the span of 3 hours.  I love my life.

I also love traditional animation.  Here's a bird jumping for an apple:

Earworm of the Day:  Due to my rule of not repeating earworms, I've officially got nothing.  Pick your own catchy tune and jam out to.  Heck, let's make it interactive.  Post your own earworm in the comments (video link is optional).

And So It Continues...

Fleet the Super Gerbil, boldly running into battle with his trusty... kitchen broom?

I know I said this would be the last "digital sticker style" character I'd make.

But...

Then a friend of suggested I do these guys next...

Galleon and Jacobson: critters from another dimension

Which got me thinking again of characters and poses, and so then I drew this...

A chrono-drive is not nearly as good at telling time as a normal watch.

And it would be a shame not to color it in... .  So it appears I'll be making these for a little while yet.  Hope nobody minds.

Earworm of the Day: The One (I'm Fighting For) by Article One.  I consider this song to be Fleets "theme song".

The Importance of Having Backstory

I love making up wacky characters of various kinds.  It's one of my favorite things about writing.  Usually though a good character is something that springs to my mind by accident.  Most of my characters, when I first write them, are incredibly flat and it may take months or years to flesh them out into a person I'd want to write dialogue for.

This holds especially true for my character Beth, who is meant to be the protagonist of the story Animalburg.  I decided that in-story she was 12 years old (my Animalburg characters have human-esque life-spans) so I assumed that she would start the story a little flat, and gain characterization as I wrote.  But I could never put pen to paper.  The character bored me, and one can't write with a boring character.

The other day I got off task and created a truly out-there character named Cylee.  She's an 7 1/2 ft tall space alien with bright green fur.  She was born during a pivotal battle of a revolutionary uprising on her home planet.  She grew up in a world of cultural turmoil.  As an adult she took a job as a grunt on a space cargo-ship.  She's traveled all over the galaxy, picking up snatches of other languages, fashion ideas from other cultures, and married a space-age gunsmith.  Her best friend is an alien that looks like a porcupine dragon.  She has an attitude, shows affection shoving people around (getting various results depending on the size of the recipient), and she knows how to curse in 10 different languages (though she's only conversationally fluent in Kenlilia and Trade-standard).  Needless to say, she's very fun to write, especially when paired against my character Owl who is much smaller than her.  She tends to treat him like a child, much to his annoyance.

Cylee yanking Owl into a stairwell, and out of danger.

And then it hit me what was wrong with Beth:  I had never given her a back-story.  So, to start the thought process, I drew Beth as a three year old.

Now I have to figure out how she went from wearing pink and dragging around a blanket to wearing cargo shorts and aspiring to be a ninja.  This will indeed be fun.

Earworm for the day: Halo by Manic Drive

Time Travel: A Problematic Activity

Time travel has been so overdone in animation. But really now, what writer hasn't fantasized about a character being able to tell his younger self that something is a bad idea, or go back in time to meet a character who is dead in their own time, or see their parents when they were their age. The potential for comedy and/or heartwarming moments is almost irresistible.

But time travel always has it's set of risks. The potential for risk changes with author interpretation, and I think that stems from the author's personal tolerance for serious brain cramps. If you change something in the past it will effect the future, this is agreed upon; question is, have the results manifested already or haven't they? Will you return to find that what you thought you were trying to change was directly caused by your meddling in the first place (ex: the scenario in Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox), or will you return to find Nazi Germany busting down your door? (incredibly unlikely, but this does seem to be a trope)

Though it's sometimes fun to speculate about the time stream, I think a major source of glitches would come from the time-travel hardware itself. My own time-traveling character uses a wrist mounted device called the Crono-Drive Series 3. It is a pretty standard concept of a time machine, able to jump back and forth over several centuries and little more than that, but it has a few issues. Longer jumps through time are inaccurate, with as much as a two year margin of error. Shorter jumps are better on the accuracy, but the corrections drain the battery. The battery takes about ten hours of recharge time (a process needing no electric cords thank goodness).

The character's father has the newest model, series 5, which is able to speed up or slow down time for the user. Useful in combat if you're likely to run into that kind of thing, but it too is a battery drainer. My character counts himself lucky with the Series 3 though. The Series 1 was a backpack with a 50 year jump range, and the Series 2... Well... let's hope you aren't very attached to that hamster shirt...