Promotional Material

As said, it have been a few busy weeks, and there are quite some more coming up. So I'll tell you where the project stands right now.

Just a week ago, I went out to do the voice recordings for the episode. I can tell you now that it was very cool. I got to work with two very talented voice actors, and was very happy with the results. I'll try and post a fragment of what they did soon, but for now... Hang on tight.

With that, the people who are making the soundtrack for this particular cartoon, can get started. The moving storyboard has been timed with the actual voice recordings, and it's a matter of making the music now. What I've heard so far sounded pretty good, but the sound folks assured me that it will sound way better when it's finished. Obviously, I'm quite curious to hear it. I'll be hearing the first bits of it this week.

Aside from the project itself, there's still a thesis to be written before august shows its face. Therefor, I will concentrate on the thesis during this week and possibly the next. I hope to get it out of the way, so I can concentrate on 'Captain Bullshit' from then on.

Captain Bullshit is still, technically, a working title, but since nothing better has presented itself to me during my brainstorms, I have gone and used it in the pilot episode. So for now, we'll call him Captain Bullshit. Today, I had to make some art for promotional material. It will be shown at the big HKU expo september 11th, but I thought I might show it to you. Again, the design and stuff is not final, but I had to send it in now, or they would KILL ME!

...........

Well, they wouldn't. But they definitely would try.

Anyway: behold the promotional artwork!

Craptastic

Not much posts lately, quite busy. Here's a little teaser.

'Nuff said.

Old Storyboard

Right now, everything considering my animation is finally starting to fall into place. I have managed to create a main character I understand, figured out how an episode should work, and I'm currently in the middle of creating a storyboard for the pilot episode I'm going to animate. With that said and in mind, I would like to start showing you some of the phases the story went through before I got that far.

What I'm going to show you now is actually the very first drawn-out version of a 'story' for the superhero. It was used for a pitch to get some money to afford voice actors (which was succesful, I got the money). This story is quite different from what it's right now, especially the way the main character works. In this story, the main character is basically a lazy-ass person who doesn't really WANT to do anything besides sitting on his ass and watching TV. In the end, this proved too hard to keep using as a motivation, so I re-tooled him in newer versions of the stories. But more on that later. Enjoy!

EPISODE: 'The Spectacular Sidekick' 

One day,  someone comes knocking on the Superhero's door.

His visitor is a young boy called 'the Sidekick', who is appointed to study superheroism under his wing by the government.

Because the superhero doesn't quite feel like doing 'super' things, he talks the Sidekick into cleaning his house, claiming it's 'for training purposes'.

The Sidekick gladly does exactly that, and the Superhero ignores the fact that the city is in terrible danger at that moment. He's not one to actually WORRY about the city.

The Sidekick, however, has too much energy in his body, and starts kung-fu-ing with the vacuum cleaner....

Destroying the superhero's appartment instead of cleaning it up.

The Superhero decides that it can't be helped: to make sure the Sidekick behaves himself, he has to fight crime so that the Sidekick will be happy. Thus, he defeats the monster threatening the city.

The monster, defeated, falls. Right on the Superhero's appartment. Everybody rejoices, save for the Superhero himself.

Though this story did essentialy work, you can also see the problem already. The superhero needs some kind of 'pressure' from outside to be goaded into any form of action. It would simply be too bothersome to keep this up if this animation would ever be serialized. There had to be SOME motivation from the main character as well. As fun as the idea of a superhero sitting on the couch was, it simply wouldn't be as effective on the long run. I did like the sidekick, though, and decided to keep him around for future storyboards.

Workspace Pictures

I thought it would be nice to give you guys an idea of my workspace, so I took some pictures today :). I share the room with four other animators (who were conveniently away when I took the pictures). Enjoy!

The door to my office... Prepare for the awesomeness behind!

Tadaam! My working office! My spot is in the back, on the left!

And there, we find my Imac (provided by school) A bit messy, like I like it. I can't seem to work in a tidy workspace!

The upper part of my wall.... early animation ideas..

..And the lower part. Mostly stuff for my Character Thesis.

The first story draft I made the past week. More on that soon!

My wall calender. The green things are important appointments! Mustn't miss those!

...And our bookcase, Filled with lots of cool books to read!

As an extra, my 'office' (or room) in Oostvoorne. Also a bit messy, as you can see!

And let's look at the wall there! Drawings I'm happy with! Hurray!

That's it, folks! More updates really soon, I hope to get some go-aheads for the story soon, and if I do, I will post those! See ya around!

Animation update!

Well, it's been a while... Crazy stuff going on here, but I finally found the time to give you another update on what I've been doing these past few weeks. Of course, I am still working on my thesis, and I can say it's going really well. Basically, I have no worries in that area whatsoever, and I'm quite confident I will be able to finish it in time, as well as making it an entertaining piece to read. 

That being said, let's look at the animation I'm maki

ng. It has gone through a lot of stages by now, so I want to give you some background into that. The idea for this animation came to me almost a year ago. I wanted to make an animated series about a superhero. Superheroes have always been a great interest of mine, I have a whole stash of comics (mostly spiderman) back at home. Since I knew quite a bit about the subject, I figured it would be nice to make fun o

ut of it :).

At first, I came up with the idea of having a superhero with a major burn-out. Someone who would basically NOT be interested in crime fighting, but rather just hangs around his lair, using his super-large monitor as a cinema screen instead of having it to observe the city and that kinda stuff. He would also have a sidekick, literally named 'the Sidekick'. That kid would be an irritating little boy with too much energy in his body, trying to get the superhero to work. I still really like the first idea, but quite soon, I ran into some problems with the concept. Basically, the main character (the superhero) had no motivation besides having none. Looking at other animated series, these characters hardly ever are used as main characters, and for a reason. They are incredibly hard to write for. You have to put them into a situation where they can't do anything but act, which is quite hard. So I made some changes.

My discision was that the superhero had to be kind of interested in his job. In the end, it turned out that he was most interested in the the adoration that being a superhero brought along. He is in it for the appreciation of the crowd. Unfortunately for the character, he has some inherent flaws that prevent him from reaching that goal. For instance, he is an impatient, arrogant bastard whose main drive is to achieve HIS goals, not those of other people. Still, he believes himself to be a good guy. He thinks he is a blessing to the city, and also acts like that. The fact that the other people complain about his actions, is dismissed by saying that the people are just being ignorant, and don't see the bigger picture.

Another element I am thinking of adding, is having the superhero being plain delusional. For instance, if a sweet old granny crossing the road is forcing him to wait, he will actually FORCE himself to see the granny as a supervillain, and attack her. You could also say he's just plain psychotic, which is good :D. As for the sidekick, I'm still thinking about keeping him, but perhaps as more of a 'voice of sanity'. More on that later.

Right now, I'm working on the storyboard/script for an episode that I want to animate. I'm hoping to be able to show you some more of that later on. So, see ya next time, hopefully with some MORE visuals.

Five Temperaments

Research is slowly starting to pay off at this end. As we speak, I have one chapter of my thesis written out. That chapter is also the most important one for the thesis, as it is all about character psychology. I found out that basically, there are five temperaments of behaviour, and people act accordingly to their temperament. Of course, mixtures are possible and such.

That might sound boring, but it's actually quite fun. For instance, I found out that most main characters in animation are either loudmouthed or plain evil. Surprise, eh? Well, it was for me. Turns out a shy character just doesn't make the ideal main character. This is important for me to know, as I will be pinpointing the characters for my own animation in the next couple of weeks. For now, enjoy the pretty picture of the temperaments. It should give you a good impression of which temperament stands for which behaviour.

But how's about the animation? Well, that's the other message for this little post... I have decided that next week will be animation week :-). For a week, I won't be working on the thesis that much, and work solely on the animation. I will try and do a daily post (if I don't forget) about the stuff I come up with, so you'll get a much better idea of what in the name of Jim I'm doing here. Cya!

I'm with Stupid

If you would ask me what I am doing right now, my answer would have to be that I am not at all working on my final animation. Okay, so maybe in my head I am trying to make a bit of a story out of it all, but that's all very little compared to the other stuff I do at a daily basis. 

The other stuff would be the research I am doing for my graduation thesis. This thesis is supposed to complement my final poject, so it only makes sense that it should be the first thing I finish. That aside, I also want to finish the thing just to get it out of the way. Mind you, I am enjoying my thesis subject, but it is kinda in the way of what I REALLY want to do. So I am trying to plough my way through the thing as fast as possible.

The title of my thesis (as it is now) is 'I'm with Stupid', and it is going to be about comedy between two or more characters. There are lots of thesis at my school about comedy, some thesis about characters, but so far I have found no thesis that really covers the chemistry between two characters. Why is Spongebob with Patrick funny, even if they are both dumb? What is funny about the conflict between Zim and Dib in Invader Zim? This interests me a great deal, as to me, characters are the heart of a cartoon. So I really want to see why some characters work so well together, in order to flesh out my own characters for my final animation.

Right now, I am looking at some books (and reading them too, yes) about comedy in general. Since I will have to cover it anyway, it seems the smart thing to do, is to just get that part over with. After that, I will look somewhat more at the characters themselves (though I have some pretty good ideas already in that area), as well as doing some case studies, which most likely are going to be Spongebob Squarepants and Invader Zim. Funny, I always figured myself a Cartoon Network geek, but end up with two Nickelodeon shows.... Still, Cartoon Network builds on Nick's ideas, so I guess it's kinda logical :).

This was Joost, reporting for duty... now to get some coffee.