Slight of Hand, Foot in Mouth

I'd be lying if I said the initial rough animatic editing process is moving along right on schedule. Fact of the matter is it's starting to drag on longer than I had hoped. I guess it's the way it goes when you've got a small handful of gags and one-liners to rework. Don't get me wrong, this is a solid project. Though like any project, some of my jokes just did not work in front of an audience. With rewrites and their corresponding storyboards behind me, I can at least say progress has been made in the last month. For the time being it's about as tight as it's gonna be till I can get my cast in the studio. It's been a bit of an internal up hill battle, and fatigue is setting in. I am very anxious to get onto the next step, but alas once the final dialogue track is recorded I will have a whole other edit to get though. The one edit I quite frankly hate the most. The final timing edit, and all the math and frame counting that applies.

As with all my posts I try to provide some eye candy. Though I don't have much by way of entertaining tidbits of production work to show quite yet, I have been playing with some new techniques in Flash.

Above you will see the quite stylish head of Really Bad Movie's very own Professor James Waxington. (Though his design may change in the months to come, lets just use this as a teaching example.) Subtle head turn not that exciting you say? Well you're right, BUT! This simple head turn will do wonders for the previously VERY limited animation I once used while pushing out past incarnations of this project. See, when doing limited animation, subtle usually translate to uncreative suit and money bozos as "time consuming" and therefor, expensive. Not so much here though! Notice the head never actually changes shape, but still gives the illusion of movement. That is because there are 4 moving parts that force your eye to think that the character is ever so slightly turning his head. In reality, it's only one drawing. Therein lies the magic of the whole thing. 1 drawing broken into multiple parts, moving together to give the illusion of full and subtle movement. I know it's not much, but damn it has me excited to get onto animation!

Where The Hell Have I Been?

I took my crap and went home! That's what I did! When I say home, I mean I moved back to North Hollywood and boy does it feel good to be back! I'm in a neighborhood I know inside and out, and more importantly I'm within blocks of nearly all my creative cohorts. Needless to say I have had quite the full plate over the last 2 months, but on the plus side I did manage to get a hell of a lot of work done on the current Really Bad Movie while maintaining a workout routine and dealing with a pretty hectic professional workload. Mind and body seem to be in tune right now and I'm feeling as productive as ever!

In trying to maintain a "by the book" style of production on this one, I completed an animatic with temporary audio track. With this I did some re-writes and adjusted my storyboards accordingly. My next to last test before recording with the cast comes Sunday when a group of my trusted few will view said animatic and provide notes. Barring any blaring issues with story, and the adjusting of a joke or two, I should get an idea of when I can record very soon. From there it's timing sheets (my least favorite part of production involving lots of math) and onto animation!



The picture at the top of the post you ask? Well that happens to be my new loft/home office in my brand new 2+2+loft! That's right for the first time in years I have NO creative work related paraphernalia in my bedroom, living room, or dining room. What has this meant to me? Well I have started reading a bit before bedtime again, and I have been getting solid nights sleep. Both of which do wonders for a guy who can only be described as "not a morning person".

All in all, things are good and always getting better. Now all that's left is to live up to my end bargain with the universe and finish this cartoon over the next year!