I had a fantastic Halloween. I know the holiday is actually today, but we all partied on Saturday.

Pictures!

I think I may go jog tonight. I’ve been beating my body to death with junk food and booze for the last three days, and I am feeling it.

Rick is here, too. Yay Rick.

Doctors suck. Telling me all what’s wrong with me. Jerks. I pay you to make me feel better. So make me feel better and lie.

Went to my first boxing match tonight. Actually went from an art show to the boxing match. That was weird.

I need to go to bed. Meh!

I got a response back from that festival. I did win something. Check it out:

Movie Nation Festival Award Winners Page And Why Am I Capitalizing All These Words?

I want to build a Voltron of trophies out of trophies.

I just started animating the next cartoon in the Email!! series. Not only did I finally get started on it, but I’m continuing the tradition of animating the cartoons drunk. If only I was at school.

I’ve changed the work flow on this one. The last cartoon was animated on paper with pencils and sharpies, and then edited together in After Effects after being captured by DV camera on a traditional animation stand. I didn’t really storyboard the cartoon or make an animatic. That was stupid, and ate up some time. It did lead to some neat little “lets do this now” moments brought on by long sleepless nights.

For this animation, I storyboarded everything and created an animatic with scratch sounds. I’ve yet to actually go in the booth and record the final audio. Right now I’ve got a cartoon with three or four characters all voiced by me. I think I can really only get away with doing the main character and one other. I’m tricky, but my voice isn’t that flexible.

One other thing I’m doing to speed up the process is drawing entirely on the computer. Every frame is being drawn in Alias Sketch with my WACOM. I like the quality of drawing I can get out of Sketch. I can’t speak for fine artists, but the program works great for stick figures. Drawing directly to the computer cuts out the time consuming capturing and image clean-up process. The entire project is digital now.

I am losing out on the big pile of drawings. It is sort of nice having a stack of paper representing all of your hard work. If I ever get famous, I can’t really sell a folder of JPGs on eBay. I’m not entirely sure I could (or would want to) sell the 250 drawings from Email!! anyway.

The digital format has a few more perks. I can quickly and easily use color. I’m not going wild with color, but there will be some with this cartoon. I can also jump right from animating to editing. I’m working on improving my frame transitions so they fit better in a TV and are easier to do. So far, so good.

So… here’s what I did tonight while listening to The Decemberists on infinite loop. This is the very first “frame” of my new cartoon. The voice is just a temp, the music will probably change, and I haven’t done lip sync so the character doesn’t have a mouth. I plan to actually lip sync this one. I’m sure that’ll be a joy.

If you’re just some fan reading this, don’t worry about spoilers. This story is based off of one of the pre-existing comics, but I made some changes. This first scene doesn’t contain any of those changes.

RIGHT CLICK - SAVE AS 2MB of “animation”… I’ll say maybe 4 seconds after the temp title card?

This audio file has an amazing number of catch phrases. Just one after the other. I had to put this on my myspace profile (yeah, I know. OMG myspace).

While it isn’t hard to find my profile, I’ll save myself some trouble by just posting this version of it:

http://buttaintmadefordat.ytmnd.com/

Enjoy

EDIT - I forgot to give proper credit. I snagged this from the SA forums.

I discovered the purpose of the steam room at the gym yesterday. I originally thought they were for gross old men to hang out in totally nude. Talking to my hetero life-mate Joe back home, that is exactly what they are in his gym. I quote “fucking old saggy dude sitting there naked and shit. Guys has a fucking towel draped on his knee while his dick is just flopped out.” My gym is better. There’s a sign in the men’s locker-room that has a list of gym etiquite. My favorite bit is Do Not Initiate Conversation if You Are Nude.

Oh… steam room. It isn’t for seeing old men’s balls. There’s a sign saying no “funny stuff” in there, but you’d have to be some sort of fucking he-man or wonder woman to fuck in there for more than 10 seconds. The steam room is designed to make you sweat off your water weight. Up to five pounds of your fleshy mass is wooter. If you have a gut, dropping some of your water weight can show a nice improvement.

Of course it’ll come back right away if you start rocking out the salty foods. Whatever.

Point of this story, I was one sweaty bastard tonight. Yuck.

Also I just got an email about maybe, possibly having won a festival. Hmmn.