Full of characters and creatures, set in many different locations, weather conditions and times of night/day, it was always going to be tough to stay on schedule but so far I’m only a week behind. This means that if I don’t catch up, we’re looking at a mid-November release.. unless I fall further behind, of course

With only a matter of weeks to release day, these may (or may not) be the last screenshots I release.

Sorry, no wallpaper download for these two yet. I’ll release a pack of them when the movie is closer to completion. If I forget, feel free to remind me!

Whenever you discover a new tool or technique, resist the temptation to cram it into your work somehow, unless it’s called for. As a storyteller, you should use only the tools that you need, rather than searching for an excuse to use them. So say “wow that’s nice, maybe I’ll need it someday” and put it in your mind’s toolbox.

For me, the prime example is Flash CS4’s 3D and IK features. They’re really cool and I’ve done loads of experiments with them, but to date I simply haven’t needed them in my work. Maybe they’re answered prayers for some animators, but forcing yourself to fill up a movie with 3D & IK just because they’re new features would result in something that looks more like a sponsored Flash CS4 ad. Consider also that once everyone else starts filling up their movies with the same features, such a movie would very quickly appear full of YAWN!

You want your audience to say “wow, what a sequence!” long before they ask “how did they do that?”. So write your story, perhaps finish the storyboard and layouts, then look at each scene and think “what’s the best way to do this? Is it worth the time to do it by hand? Or is there a tool that can do it quicker without distracting the audience?”

As a final thought, treat everything in the movie with the same philosophy. Don’t let the technique get in the way of the story. If you spend 3 days on a single background, no matter how proud of it you are, don’t fall into the trap of extending the scene just so the audience has more time to take in your hard work. That’s bad storytelling.

Examples

In hitchHiker part two I downloaded and animated a bunch of 3D vehicles in Swift3D. It saved me a lot of time and I tried to bring them down to a hand-drawn feel but in the end, they do clash with the crudely drawn characters and backgrounds. I’m certain that anyone seeing hitchHiker 2 for the first time is distracted momentarily by the technique. Having said that though, if I were to remake hitchHiker I WOULD use 3D vehicles again, but this time I’d try to bring the characters and backgrounds up so their level of shading is a bit closer to the vehicles.

In Prowlies, I roughly modelled and animated the tree jumping sequence in Swift3D, but the render was too heavy and complex for importing into Flash. So I reverted to hand-drawn trees, simply tweening them backwards into the darkness toward a floating vanishing point (a technique I developed and eventually used to the full in The Yuyu). At the end of the sequence, the camera rotates around a tree, so this is the only 3D tree I used. I kept the detail sparse on the tree in order to blend with the hand-drawn trees, but unfortunately it looks exactly what it is.. a bunch of vector-rendered 3D cylinders!

When I started work on the Yuyu, the floating camera effect during the big ‘rippling terrain’ sequence was originally something I thought I’d be doing in Maya or Swift3D. However, the thought of all that messing about with modelling, rendering and importing was more daunting than drawing it frame-by-frame on singles, so as crazy as it may sound, I opted for the latter. I’m glad I did because the hand-drawn organic feel of the animated backgrounds is much more suited to Brackenwood than a mathematically perfect 3D render.

The swarm in Waterlollies is another example. They were originally to be all actionscript generated particle simulations. When the movie was almost finished though, I really didn’t like how some of them looked, and all the tweaking in the world wasn’t going to get the “character” I wanted in that swarm.

The coded swarm saved me a lot of work, but it looked like a particle simulation of white pixels, rather than a living swarm. That’s not to say the programmer didn’t do an incredible job with what I was asking.

So I went back through and hand-animated most of them. If you look at the movie now, you’ll see there’s only about 3 or 4 coded swarms. While it was very time-consuming to do the swarms manually, not only did that give me complete control over them, but it also fit the hand-drawn style of the rest of the movie (below).

While extremely time-consuming, the swirling clusters of gnats fits the style of the movie perfectly.

On several gaming sites, there’s a bit of buzz about the new EA2D game on which I did art & animation. Check out this article on GamePro.com about Dragon Age Journeys, which is officially released in about 6 hours from the time I’m writing this.

This will be a trilogy and chapter 1 is free to play. It’s quite a deep chapter too, with an epic story line. You’ll spend an estimated 2½ hrs getting through it on easy mode. It’ll be an open beta so go nuts and tell us what you think. You can also follow DAJourneys on twitter for the very latest.

New movie update

Here’s the latest progress graph. Yes I’ve been slipping behind, so now I’m about a week South of where I want to be but a few difficult scenes are out of the way and there are a few more to come yet. I typically speed up towards the end of a project.. then again, there’s not much typical about this particular Brackenwood movie. There are very few reusable backgrounds and almost no reusable animation. I’d rate it about as difficult as The Yuyu, but in a different way. You’ll see

Plush Bitey

Morichax is an artist over at Newgrounds and recently she made a Bitey plush toy that was featured on NG’s front page. She’s done a great job on it and everyone wants one, including me. Check it out.

Admittedly, Blend Modes are something I never quite understood until recently. I experimented when they first appeared back in Flash 8, but apart from simple colour effects, I couldn’t see any immediate practical application for them in my work.

I recently received an email from someone who had bought my Flash chapters. He disagreed when I wrote that masks in Flash can’t have variable opacity or blur. He went on to describe a workaround method using Blend Modes that blew my mind and made me wonder just how much can be achieved with the technique.

Blend Modes as you probably know can only be applied to movieclips. You don’t use Mask layers at all for the effect so technically (in the Flash sense of the word) it’s not “masking”. What it IS though, is a very simple and versatile workaround that happens to surpass masking as we know it.

Best of all, the technique can be used for a number of effects so it ticks several other boxes near the top of my Flash features wish-list.

After the ad break, this post will cover two particularly useful Blend Mode applications:

• layer blend
• gradient mask

Layer Blend

Let’s start with a Blend Mode that may be a little more well-known amongst animators but still pretty obscure. Take a character that consists of many seperate elements. Put him in a graphic symbol or a movieclip, then fade him off. Like a scene from a nightmare, all his segments will be revealed to your audience.

If you place the character in a movieclip however, set the Blend Mode to ‘Layer’, you can safely fade off the character without all his nested layers showing up. This technique is also very useful for cross-dissolving entire scenes for a slick cinematic feel.

Alpha Gradient Mask

Here it is then.. something that Flash animators have wanted since the dawn of time: alpha gradient masks. As mentioned earlier, this is a masking effect but it doesn’t use Flash masks at all. The example I’m using is for a soft-edged light pool effect from a torch beam.

To avoid confusion with masking terminology, let’s call them something else (which I’ll capitalise for clarity). Using the above example, we’ll call the torch beam a MATTE and the background it affects, an ELEMENT. These two major components are placed (or created)  inside a PARENT movieclip.

oops, in the above clip, I forgot to say “Set PARENT” blend mode to Layer.

1. PARENT clip: must be a movieclip. It’s like a mini scene that contains MATTE and ELEMENT layers.
   • MATTE : must be a movieclip, containing the effect artwork (i.e. the light pool in our example)
   • ELEMENTS: These layer(s) contain all the stuff that is to be treated by the MATTE layer. It can be anything at all.. multiple layers, motion or shape tween, raw FxF animation. These can be symbols or not.
2. EFFECT layers: these are any layers outside of the clips that are affected, treated or revealed by the effects in the PARENT clip.

Important: Again, here are the blend modes to set:

1. PARENT clip – set Blend Mode to Layer
2. MATTE clip- set Blend Mode to Erase.

How it works

In the example file I’ve provided (download HERE), there are two backgrounds. One is dark night, and the other is identical except it’s coloured differently, as to be lit up by the torch beam.

Inside the PARENT clip, the Alpha blend mode turns the MATTE clip into a mask, cutting a window in the ELEMENT layer(s). In this case, the torch light cuts a hole in the dark background, revealing the light background underneath, as you can see in the finished scene at the top of this post.

Note: To give the pool of light some realism, I’ve painted it with a radial gradient to look like an old style torch light. The gradient contains some different alpha levels to vary the opacity of the effect. You could also blur the MATTE clip, or apply any other filters like Adjust Color, Glow, Drop Shadow, etc.

Summary

There’s something else you might like to experiment with and that’s the Alpha blend mode. It will reverse the effect of the MATTE layer by blocking out, rather than revealing. Inverse Masking is something else I can cross off my Flash features wish-list.

I should take this opportunity to thank Ivan Berov who took the time to email me and include his own example files. I should also apologise to Henrik Anderssen who I dismissed as crazy when he said that blurred masks have been possible in Flash for a long time. If you ever read this, my apologies man

One particular treatment that can make all the difference to an effect is a variable opacity. With gradients and blur in Flash we have a limited ability to vary the opacity of an effect but there’s an unassuming tool that you may never have considered using.

Anyone who has used ToonBoom software to draw or paint knows that each individual pencil line or brush stroke is treated as a seperate object. This means you can sketch a line with many short strokes, then, if you find the line is too sketchy or ‘hairy’, rather than erasing or undoing, you can easily select and remove any rogue strokes.
(continued after the ad)

Object Drawing

It may or may not be news to you that Flash has this too. What might come as news however is that it also allows us to pull off some nice variable opacity effects. Next, I’ll show you how I use Object Drawing mode for variable opacity in fog FX.

Fog and Mist

I usually paint a fog effect with a low-alpha white paint. With Object Drawing mode OFF, your fog remains a consistent, flat transparency value no matter how many brush strokes you make.

To put depth and layers of fog into it, turn Object Drawing mode ON and start painting. Soon you’ll see that each stroke adds opacity, giving you ultimate control over the effect.

Of course to finish it off, place the whole thing into a movieclip and blur it. You can explore this file (linked at the end of this post) to see how I’ve animated the effect too.

Watercolour effect

This method is a lot like watercolour. Each time you place a brush stroke, you are adding weight to the colour. Start off with something simple, like an apple. Use a big fat brush with red paint at 5% alpha, then begin layering.

As you can see, the range of effects you can pull off with these techniques is impressive. It opens up a whole new part of the program that even seasoned Flash animators mightn’t know exists. The best thing is that it all comes with vector file sizes!

You can download the .FLA (Flash CS3 format) in which I created the above examples. It includes the animation of the mist effect for you to pull apart and explore.

With a bit of crunchy linework it’s not really suitable for close-up viewing, but click on it to get the high-res version. It’s 1680 x 1344. Not exactly wallpaper dimensions but I’m sure it’ll work OK as wallpaper somehow.

Progress

In the graph below, you’ll notice the green’s scattered a bit. That’s because I’ve been tackling a few of the more challenging or tedious scenes first. This has put me behind schedule a bit, but as I mentioned yesterday, hopefully falling behind on the harder stuff at the beginning will mean I speed up as things get easier towards the end. Fingers crossed.

New blog theme

With this particular theme, you can drag sidebar elements and arrange them to your liking, so go ahead and customise it and let me know what you think.

I’ll be tweaking the theme over the coming weeks, months & probably years, while I experiment with the settings. I like how clean this one is, but I would prefer less flat grey all over the place. Feel free to suggest stuff, but ultimately I’ll just be messing about until I find something I like.

Alright then. Back to work. Next graph coming in a couple days!

Comments on the blog weren’t working for a long time so yesterday I decided to upgrade my Wordpress installation and finally get it all fixed. Only problem is that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and ended up breaking everything.. and I mean everything.

I realised long ago that web guru friends start avoiding you if you keep asking them to fix stuff for you, just like I avoid friends and family who ask me to draw stuff for them. So I went to oDesk and advertised the job.

Within 7 minutes, I had interviewed a candidate from Indonesia, agreed on a fixed rate and hired him. Here we are 12 hours later and it’s done. The work turned out to be twice as complex as we expected, so when he was done, I paid the guy double the agreed rate.. he did such an incredible job and worked very hard all day restoring all the old posts. I can’t believe he actually asked my permission to go have dinner! Amazing guy to whom I’m very grateful.

So not only are comments now working, but everything else too! The only thing that was lost (long before I stuck my thumbs in there, apparently) are all the past comments. Each post displays a number of comments but they’re just ghosts. Only the comments from this day forward will appear.

Brackenwood untitled

In other news (and I’ll be more specific tomorrow) I did a marathon animation session today and got loads of really difficult stuff done.  I’ve been trying to get some of the more technically challenging animation out of the way first, so while I appear to be behind now, hopefully I’ll speed up towards the end and deliver on time.

That’s the plan, anyway.

G’NIGHT!

I’m really proud of what we’ve done on this project. It has been awesome fun (it ain’t over yet, either) and the guys I’m working with are incredible. Fans of RPGs may be familiar with the work of genius programmer Daniel Stradwick. He’s responsible for the phenomenally successful  Monster’s Den (over 15 million plays web-wide!!), over on Kongregate.

oh yeah and today’s new Brackenwood movie progress graph:

I’m not going to apologise for being inactive because that’s how I’ve opened so many blog posts, it’s getting old. The fact is that with micro-blogging (Twitter) sucking all my best thoughts out as they happen, there’s not much left for a full blog article. Besides, there’s only so many times you can say “still overloaded with freelance stuff but have big plans for Brackenwood”, before it sounds like lies.. especially with nothing to show for these big Brackenwood plans.

Flash or ToonBoom?

So what have I been up to all this time? I mean, it’s been almost two years since the release of Waterlollies. Soon after that, besotted with ToonBoom, some may recall that I announced that I may not do another Flash Brackenwood.

I admit now that’s something I didn’t really think about before saying. If I had thought about it, I’d have realised that Flash is where the Brackenwood audience is, particularly thanks to Newgrounds. If I completely abandoned Flash in favour of ToonBoom, I’d be alienating my biggest audience, the .swf audience. My YouTube channel just doesn’t give Brackenwood the same exposure as Newgrounds. Here are the figures at last count:

My YouTube channel – 50 movies – 1.2 million views

My Newgrounds page – 10 movies – 11.9 million views

Having said that, if the Brackenwood feature film is 2D and I have any control over how it’s done, it’ll be ToonBoom all the way. As you can see with the D&D shorts, ToonBoom gives me so much freedom to do the stuff I’ve always wanted to do, whereas Flash is very limiting.

New Brackenwood started

OK here’s the announcement then. I’m currently working on a new Brackenwood movie for Newgrounds, which means I’m using Flash. Unfortunately Flash CS4 refuses to co-operate so I’m using Flash CS3. Without giving anything away about the story, let’s just say that it’ll answer a lot of questions. Questions about what? You’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime I’ll be posting screenshots and timelapse screen captures, thanks to Camtasia Studio (techsmith.com).

The reason I’m making all these promises now is to force myself to get the job finished. I always work better to a deadline that I’ve announced, because the pressure of audience anticipation lights a fire under me. For the release, I’ve set a tentative date for the first week of November (2 year anniversary of Waterlollies). It absolutely must get done by then.. so email me your encouragement and impatience

Screenshots next week! Promise. For now though, here’s something I found while going through some old backup hard drives. It’s a scene test from the Yuyu, containing rough animation. Enjoy!