Half True

I hope you guys enjoyed the April Fools pic. It was indeed a joke, but the part about my job is real.

Dark Days

Hey guys. I'm posting a follow up to last week's post and letting everyone know what's going on. Well, for starters, I got laid off yesterday so I am no longer bound by the 9-5. It's been brewing for 3 months and the bottom of the company fell out temporarily and I happened to fall through. I'm not angry or anything since it is most likely a blessing in disguise. I can go to school full-time in the fall while collecting unemployment, and best of all, I'll have plenty of time to work on CC! And you know what plenty of time = ? Release!

Yes, that's right my friends, now that I am a bum at home with nothing better to do than play video games and drink beer (oh and do occasional homework, pff), I can devote much more time to working on CC. So really, it's not a bad gig, right? I mean, after taking a 30% paycut earlier this year, I'll probably be making close to that money on the unemployment bandwagon. I'm fine, really.

Also, in celebration of completing Act 2, here is a little screenshot of what's to come.



Enjoy!

Relive the Magic

Yup. It was 3 years ago today that I released the trailer and it is still being enjoyed by many. I wish the movie was out by now but it would not have been as good as it will be when it's been completed.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/303079

Act 2 is going as planned. I had aimed to finish it by the end of this month, and will actually meet that goal. It's very exciting to see the light at the end of the tunnel and see all the hard work come to fruition. I've been working on the final seconds for Act 2 for quite some time and it's pretty intense as to what came out of it all. Additional pre-production for Act 3 will start soon and work on the final 60 seconds will commence.

Expect a new screenshot sometime next week.

More Character Designs

Here are a couple more images from a character I designed. We were supposed to make a character and draw it in different styles. Here is a comic book rendition and a style of one of my favorite artist's, Sean "Cheeks" Galloway.






Hope you guys like 'em!

As for Sonic, I've been working on it a little bit every few days. Act 2 should be finalized by the end of the month. I'm excited!

On My Mind

Do you guys think NuShift.net needs a redesign? Cuz I do. I don't really have any idea what I want to do for it and as much as website design gives me indigestion, I still feel good when it's all said and done.

I rented Killzone 2 and it's amazing. I'm not really into console FPS but this one has changed my tune. Definitely check it out if you get a chance.

I worked on CC last night, just coloring up some frames really quick. Spring break is coming up this week, but I still have to go to work, so it's not much of a break for me. I'm sure I'll be loaded up with plenty of HW to carry me through.

Act 2 is still chugging along. Ideally, the best route is to do the drawing and animation at home, and then in my freetime at work, cleanup and color. The past few weeks at work there hasn't been anything going on, so I just worked on HW and CC for 8 hours a day. Nice, right? This week, not so much. Got some updates and new projects to do so my freetime has come to a temporary end. Hopefully it'll come back soon.

There's some stuff I want to get done in a relatively short amount of time but I usually only have the motivation at work during the day. When I arrive at home, I don't feel like doing anything other than chilling out. This blog post? Yeah, I'd never do this at home, that's for sure. Anyway, CC is looking really good. Everytime I work on it, it seems the new animation looks better and better. I wish Newgrounds enabled either other file formats or even more than 15mb swf files. It would be so awesome if I had the power of After Effects in the CC workflow. Flash is so limiting and I realize this everytime I work on the project. With AE, I could truly achieve the finesse and quality that I strive for. For example, to make glowing explosions look white hot, it takes a few mouseclicks and a couple glow setting adjustments to achieve that look in AE. In Flash, it requires converting every white ember to a movieclip and messing with the individual glow settings to get it right because even if there are multiple embers in one movieclip, the glow effect does not do a good job at maintaining the effect between each individual ember.

I've been reluctant to actually learn ToonBoom. As Adam Phillips has mentioned, it's supposedly really intuitive and a good piece of software. Maybe for a future project I'll take the time to learn it. It's got some nice features like a moveable camera, color palette customization (with names, OMG!), and rotable viewport. I think Flash for animation is becoming outdated. They keep adding features to the development side of things and while CS4 did add some stuff for the animator and designer, it's still nowhere as robust as it needs to be. IK bones? Seriously? I don't see myself ever doing puppet animation again. I could have used that feature like what, 8 years ago?

As far as I'm concerned, Flash can be used in a workflow but shouldn't be the ONLY program. It should be used in conjunction with some sort of post-production application to get the film-like quality if you so choose.

Bears, Beets, Battlestar Galactica

Hey guys. Act 2 is being pushed hard as I want that out of the way before I continue work on Act 3. I've been working on it here and there, quite a few hours logged over the weekend already. All of the animation is done for the last part of Act 2. All that's left is color, cleanup, and backgrounds which makes me happy. The project is still on track for a Christmas 2009 release as everything is looking good.

Here's some stuff I've been working on at school. The assignment was to draw a hero and a villain. More stuff to come soon.



Enjoy!

Total Time for February: 9 hours

Posters and Pies

School is full swing, I try to do my homework during downtime that pops up often and when homework is complete and downtime still remains, I end up working on CC.

A few weeks ago, my girlfriend and I made chicken pot pies for dinner. I cut out Sonic on one of them.



On another note, last semester we had a business project to do which involved an animated trailer and promotional ads for the movie and production company. We chose to use CC because...well, the trailer was done. My girlfriend ended up drawing a promotional poster for Cosmic Chase in her own style and I think it turned out really good.



Total Hours for January: 9h 30m