Inking continues its slow, steady march towards the sea, where it will break up and form lovely icebergs to sink unsuspecting passenger liners…

Oops. Freudian slip. The glacier-like pace of digital inking made the ol’ noodle stumble a bit. My apologies…

Anyway, we’re down to seven scenes left to ink. Had a nasty thunderstorm roll through last night during prime inking time, and I was forced to shut down and unplug the computers before any work got done (Paranoid? I’ve been in a house that’s suffered a lightning hit and trust me, you DON’T want anything electrical plugged in when those things pop you). This is yet another reason to explore inking and coloring on paper.

I keep waiting for the Fedex guy to show up with my markers, but so far no dice. Time for a nasty phone call to some poor customer service sap…

In a previous post I mentioned that I was splitting the robot movie production into twenty (so far) separate sections. Thought I’d give you an overview of my gameplan for the first section:

1. Clean up our models
2. Storyboard the changes from the original storyboard
3. Design the set
4. Record dialog
5. Staging/blocking
6. Editing
7. Lighting/final shading
8. Final render
9. Final edit

Sound effects and audio mix will come after all sections have been completed.

So, what’s next? Well, when I did How Space Wars Begin, I took poses of Larry and put them on one layer of the animatic reel. Then I sketched some mouth shapes, put them on a separate layer of the reel, and synced them up to the dialog track. Finally I went through both synced layers, noted the mouth and pose combinations, and drew the pencil roughs. Hard to explain in a way that makes sense — after this first short is released, I’ll post the animatic reel for all to see.

Background: These are the next installments of a series of shorts that started with How Space Wars Begin, using the little three-eyed alien (otherwise known as Three-Eyed Larry) as the star (I hesitiate to use the word “hero”). There are currently two shorts in pre-production, with script ideas for at least three others floating around.

Gorgeous, ain’t he? Actually, this is a prototype - the real McCoy has more work left to do (redo his claws & eyes, change his colors, round off some of those sharp edges, among other things). Still, it’s pretty darn close. Very similar in appearance to our hero from Break Time. Although you won’t be able to see the finished model until the movie is released*, I figured I’d give you patient people a glimpse at where the design is going.

Some background: this film is the first in a series of robot movies I’ve been toying with in my noodle since early 2002. In fact, Break Time was initially created as a test movie to try out some of the various large-scale filmmaking techniques I would need to produce these other robot movies. Right now, there are plans for four films — there may be others…

*A subject for another post…

I just sent off an order to one of the online art stores for some new Prismacolor markers. Gonna try something new with future 2-D movies.  Instead of trying to do everything on the computer - where I can only go, at most, an hour a night — I want to do the inking and coloring on marker paper (Bienfang Graphics 360), then scan the results and layer in Painter accordingly. I’ve actually been wanting to do this for a long time, but it was next to impossible using a digital camera (lens distortion, focus issues). Anyway, I’ve modified the POV code so that it outputs all the layers I’m using in a particular sequence/scene onto single sheets of paper; I’m going to print those out and and put the marker paper over it to trace. Probably won’t be used for the remainder of Scary Monster Vs Lucky Frog, which is too bad. For all I know, though, this mad little scheme of mine will end up looking like complete crap and wasting hundreds of thousands of hours. I just know I can trace with a Sharpie & color with a marker a hell of a lot faster than I can with a Wacom tablet, and paper & markers are far more portable than the iMac (not to mention the more positive social aspect of tracing and coloring in the same room the rest of the family is occupying). So, it’s worth a try. If it works, I’ll detail the process here so you have a better idea what I’m doing…

Finally, sketched out some poses for one of the new Three-Eyed Larry shorts I’ve got in pre-production. I recorded audio last week but I haven’t yet gone through the various takes to decide what’s good and what’s not. Hopefully this weekend I can get enough usable dialog together so I can Frankenstein something worth animating…

Scary Monster Vs Lucky Frog is creeping along at a speed normally associated with moving tectonic plates, and as a result I’m starting to lose my marbles. This is not good — my puny brain is the only thing that separates me from monkeys, and losing it would mean a lifetime eating bananas and flinging dung around. Production went south roughly the same time I decided to do away with production deadlines, so I suppose it doesn’t take a genius to see what the fix is. Yeah, deadlines make me nutty, but so far the lack of any hasn’t kept my mental boat on an even keel, and if I’m going to be a stark-raving lunatic I might as well hold a finished film in my hands than not. Easier to explain to the shrinks — or zookeepers. Anyway, I have the end of July as the deadline for finishing inking, with two months to get on the coloring. If all goes well, we’ll have a release date of October 31st…

Speaking of things that make me crazy, what I’ve rediscovered through the self-inflicted stupidity of Scary Monster 2 is that my attention span is far too short to tolerate slugging through the same movie for longer than two months without wanting to shove a flaming poker through my skull. I’m the only person working on these films, and the amount of time I can devote to them on any given day is minute. As a result, these films take forever to produce, and after a few months spent working on the same project something that’s worth maybe two minutes or less of film time, my brain says, “Enough, already!”

Why bring this up? Well, sitting just over the horizon is the first episode of the robot series I’ve been wanting to do for over two years now. The first animatics reel I did for it put it just a shade under ten minutes long. If I use the same production math for Break Time — seven months of work for six minutes of movie — I’m probably staring at an entire year to shoot this thing.

Hmmm. This is a problem…

What does one do??? Well, instead of eating the elephant all at one sitting, I’ve got it split up into twenty separate mini-projects of various lengths (all short). If I can crank out one or two of these guys, take a break, then kick out a couple more, it might go a long way towards keeping me off Death Row. Each project would be considered a whole movie in and of itself, so I’ll go through the same steps for each one from start to finish — storyboard, dialog, models, etc — all the way through the final shading and rendering. The only thing that would be excluded would be the sound effects and music.

So, that’s the game plan. I tend to flake out when implementing these plans, but not this time — I absolutely cannot continue doing business the way I’ve been going about it, not if I want to get these movies finished and shown at film festivals any time this millenium.  I have to change my ways, even if it kills me…

Who are these guys? What are they doing? What are they looking for? They’re in some scary place, but where? What are those things behind them, with the scary eyes?

I don’t know…

Sometimes the story comes to us right in the middle of things, and conveniently leaves out the beginning and the end… and the characters’ names, places, etc. The monster and the alien have been loitering around the fringes of my imagination for the last six months, looking for some sort of trouble to get into (here’s a link to their first appearance — in color, no less). I have a few more sketches of them I plan to post in the next week or so… and that might just be all I have on them. As much as I’d love yet another diversion, I really can’t afford one. We’ll see…

Here’s the original sketch. I drew the pointing alien first on some 6″ x 9″ paper, decided he needed friends & drew them, then I did the saucer (I mean, how else do you expect them to get around, mm?). Finally, I scanned it, then used Painter to composite the aliens and saucer together, and add shadows & background with the charcoal tool. And that’s the truth…

Millions and billions and zillions of years ago, when the Earth was young and teeming with all sorts of freaky mutant lifeforms, frogs were a lot bigger and meaner than they are today. This is an artistic rendering based on fossils dug up in my back yard of the vicious three-eyed Space Frog. Not exactly sure what the deal was with the third eye — a laser rangefinder, maybe? Details are sketchy on this feature, but suffice to say the Space Frog needed to be a badass because the flies it feasted on tended to be well-armed…