Podcast Episode, St7 Intro Animated, & Inktober
Added 2021-10-19 18:53:28 +0000 UTC[Post contains no story spoilers]
Hi Patrons,
Here is the second update of the month!
Inktober
A few days into the month I decided to take on the Inktober challenge (draw something for all 31 days of October). The daily prompts have been good practice for my traditional art, and it's been very manageable (as opposed to 2019's attempt, which caused a fair bit of hand cramps).
You can see all 19 of my completed days so far in the gallery above! To follow along, you can look at my Instagram where I've been posting my progress.
Story 7 Intro Animated
The character animation for Story 7's intro sequence is 100% complete. All characters have been animated, cleaned, and inked. Three phases still remain (background art, scoring, & compositing), but those will be done in parallel by the rest of the team. We are gradually setting a standard for the background rendering style and quality, so things will be progressing down the pipeline soon.
I'm taking heavy inspiration from ancient Greek & Roman architecture for the colosseum. Creating a "stickman" world equivalent of archeology has been real trip down memory lane. I hope to capture significant animations from early 2000's stick fights in the backgrounds of Story 7.
Since I am a fan of pitting elements against each other, I'll be directing the team to contrast wind against rock in all aspects of the animation, including backgrounds and scoring. Story-wise, I want to drop Gildedguy in between these two powerful forces, and see which one he must inevitably align with.
Jumping into the Heart of the Animation
With the intro animated, I'll soon start synchronizing my drawings to the featured track of Story 7: Rock Ain't Dead by ONLAP. If the past couple months have been setup, this is the BULK of the production, and where innovation and risk taking must occur. I'm incredibly excited to get back into fight choreography.
Even more so, this is a lyrical song, with heavy ROCK and guitar vibes - I've been itching to animate something AMV-like since the end of Vs Oxob (over a year now). The fight will cover emotional beats (such as Andre's backstory), but I'll be putting heavy effort into bombastic & fun fight scenes. With a song like Rock Ain't Dead, the "rule of cool" cannot be ignored - I want to make this animation feel awesome!
Animator Guild Podcast & 15 MAT Results
Go here to see me talk to Howard about animation!
Howard from Animator Guild interviewed me for his podcast. For over an hour, we talked about the path to independent art, animation techniques, and our favorite games/movies. I wasn't expecting to be on camera, but heck, you guys deserve to see a little of what I look like behind the screen. So enjoy!
Another fun collaborative thing I got to participate in was Hatena's 15-Man Animator Tournament. Though I didn't make it to the final round, our close friend of the Gildedguy server, "KAP" won! Congrats to KAP, he's a very talented animator, with a matching work-ethic (which can be rare to see!). The charity event raised over $1800 for the Red Cross.
Here are some of my 15-minute animations.
Color & Cat (I lost on the Cat one to Rivvie)
Pumpkin Carving Contest Reminder
A quick reminder that we're hosting a small pumpkin carving/drawing contest on the Discord server. If you have a nice carving or drawing, you could win $100! Check the announcements on the server!
Thanks for your support, and enjoy your Halloween week.
