Status Report for July 8, 2008

First of all, a big “thank you” to the nice people at deviantArt.com for picking Break Time as a Daily Deviation for July 3. Very cool! Definitely an interesting crowd that runs on dA, and I mean interesting in a good way. Thanks again for the love :) (I posted a big thanks on my dA page, but I forgot to post one here — not that anybody visits my website :( )

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…